How to test if sorting by dates on a web page is working fine

I am automating some features on a web application using selenium and java. One of the pages on the web application list documents and they can be sorted by clicking on two options "Most Recent" that shows the documents uploaded recently on top. I am writing test case to verify if this sorting is working fine. How to verify if the documents are infact sorted in that order. The list shows only the document name and message like "Uploaded about 2 hrs ago" , "Uploaded 1 day ago", if I capture this message in to a list , is there a way to compare these two and make sure the one that gets displayed on top is recent. Thanks in Advance!