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.
Everton pushing on-line magazine subscriptions
This story was published Oct. 31, 1999
Everton Publishers Inc., is now using its Web site to promote subscriptions to its highly respected Everton's Genealogical Helper magazine.
The company has long had an Internet presence, but it had been some time since I visited its site.
Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter for Oct. 23 called my attention to a change in Everton's business philosophy.
Formerly an adjunct to the magazine that Everton has published for more than 50 years, the Web site now is offering full access to the magazine on the Web.
Full access is understandably reserved for subscribers, but under the new philosophy, Everton posts "teasers" on a Web site that anyone can access.
Net surfers can read the first several paragraphs of articles. If they want entire articles, they have to subscribe to the service.
The subscription allows on-line access to entire articles, as well as to Everton's magazine archives from wherever in the world the reader might be.
The company also offers a variety of other services on its Web site. If you aren't familiar with Everton, just tune your Internet browser to everton.com and take a gander. If you're familiar with Everton's offerings, you don't need any coaxing.
Everton claims Everton's Genealogical Helper has the largest circulation of any genealogical magazine. It consists of how-to articles, success stories and queries about lost ancestors.
Like so many other companies in the genealogy business, Everton also sells a variety of top-notch products and services, including on-line searching.
***
I've received several inquires in response to an earlier column on recording data, so will revisit the subject briefly.
Genealogists always record events according to the times in which they happened.
For instance, if you found an ancestor born in Kennewick in 1904, you would not record the birth as Kennewick, Benton County, Wash., but as Kennewick, Yakima County, Wash., because Benton County wasn't created until 1905.
If the birth occurred in 1864, you would record it as Kennewick, Walla Walla County, Wash. For that matter, a birth in Yakima in 1864 would be recorded as Yakima, Walla Walla County, Wash., because Yakima County was created out of Walla Walla County in 1865.
Some counties were formed out of parts of two or more counties. Determining where events happened, and thus often where one looks for records, can be difficult in areas that have undergone a long series of geographic change.
Nowhere that I know of is this problem more pronounced than in Europe, which has seen an almost continual change of political boundaries.
Records are not transferred from old units to the new ones, but remain in the county seat, or state or territory that had jurisdiction at the time they were created.
For the United States, Everton's The Handybook for Genealogists is one of the standard references readily available at libraries and at the Mormon Church's Family History Centers. Or consider investing in your own reference library.