The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Why pay for something that's free?
This column was published Oct. 13, 1996
I don't know if the folks at Halbert's think I'm stupid, or what. I shouldn't have bought their first "Day" book, and now they want to sell me another.
The new one is The Days Since 1620. Normally, I wouldn't admit in polite company, I bought a Halbert book, but, OK, I confess.
In 1990, under the influence of 100-proof journalistic curiosity, I forked out 20-some bucks for Halbert's The World Book of Days, which consists of some boilerplate about genealogy and The Day International Registry.
Boilerplate is standardized information a journalist has occasion to use over and over. Instead of writing it fresh for each use, it is saved and reused as occasion arises.
There is good boilerplate and bad. The boilerplate in the front of The World Book of Days, 90 pages of it, is of the good variety; but it's hardly worth almost $30 because you can come by it for $5 or less via a library and a copy machine.
The registry contained 58,979 Day households; 34,124 in the United States, 2,582 in Canada, 3,170 in Australia, 595 in New Zealand, 18,469 in Great Britain, and 39 in Northern Ireland.
Many critics claim Halbert's registries consist of telephone directory information, minus telephone numbers. However, I think they combine other databases because my brother in Poway, Calif., who has an unlisted number, is in The World Book of Days.
The real question is: Of what value are the names and addresses of 58,979 Day households? Halbert suggests the registry can help genealogists or people who are trying to locate the living lost.
Technically, that's true. But the registry is organized by ZIP Code, which makes it awfully difficult to look for Uncle Wilhelm or Cousin Christine unless you know where they live. And if you know where they live, why do you need Halbert's book?
Many have criticized Halbert's for a sales approach they believe misleads many to think their books contain genealogies. The circular I recently received aims to clear up that giant misconception. A reasonably bold disclaimer says: "No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended."
That point likely hurts sales, but it may help keep the company out of court.
If you still want to sink $29.50 into a Halbert book for your surname, go right ahead. There are worse ways to throw away $30. But if you simply want to look for your family's living lost, why not do it free on the Internet? If you don't have a connection, your local library probably does.
The Internet has several resources for your search. My favorite is Switchboard.
As an example of how it works, in only three or four minutes, I found 17 Days in the United States who share my first name and got the telephone numbers and addresses for all of us.
Only four of us spell Terence my way - one R and no A. Two of us actually have the middle initial L. The other one lives in Garner, N.C. Eight spell it "Terrence," six spell it "Terrance," and two spell it "Terance."
There are several points to make in all of this. First, computerized directories require us to enter all the spellings we want to check for any name. Second, even with four variants, these "search engines" are wonderously fast. It takes almost no time at all to check for uncommon names.
I shudder to think, however, how long it would take to check for John Smith, William Jones, Charles Johnson, or any other common surname combined with a common first name. Remember, too, many people list only initials in the phone book.
This brings us back to Halbert's books. The problem of looking under different spellings and ways of listing names also exists in print. But if you have a common surname shared by millions of Americans, I presume you are spared Halbert's solicita tions. It would take dozens of volumes to print a World Book of Smiths.
If you want to give the World Wide Web directories a try, here are some addresses:
Switchboard: http:// www.switchboard.com/bin/ cgiqa.dll. (Those are L's at the end, not ones.)
Excite People Finder: http:// www.excite.com/Reference/ locators.htmlwhite?bkb.
Four11:
http://www.Four11.com/cgi-bin/ Four11Main?fonesearch&FormId
And for those who are looking for Canadians there, is InfoSpace People Search:
http:// 206.129.166.101/ canada.html.
Copyright 1996 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.