To initialize to current date, you could do something like:
Date firstDate = new Date();
To get it from String, you could use SimpleDateFormat like:
String dateInString = "10-Jan-2016";
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yyyy");
try {
Date date = formatter.parse(dateInString);
System.out.println(date);
System.out.println(formatter.format(date));
} catch (ParseException e) {
//handle exception if date is not in "dd-MMM-yyyy" format
}