From what I can gather after reading all his posts, I think you would be buying the actual article as it appeared in the magazine but you would not be buying the whole magazine. He does not deal in copies according to his info. I think he cuts out articles, indexes the names he finds in them, and sells the articles. At $24 a pop, he is making a bundle on one magazine if he sells all the articles from the magazine. I do not think he can answer the date question because that info is not contained in the article's pages. That is on the cover, spine, or content page. I still think he is strange but if he gave you the title and date of the mag, he is worried you will find it elsewhere. I think he is trying to protect his time investment rather than trying to sell the info to Ancestry. The database would only be useful if all the articles are scanned too but I do not think he is doing that, only indexing names in the articles for internet searchers to stumble upon and hopefully buy the article.