This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Charles Taze Russell began publishing Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence in 1879, having separated from the Adventist teacher Nelson Barbour over doctrinal disagreements the two men could not resolve between them. Five years later, in 1884, Russell gave the movement a legal form of its own, incorporating the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society with himself installed as its president.
The movement did not stay fixed after Russell's own death. His successor, Joseph Rutherford, brought the Bible Students to a convention in Columbus, Ohio, and on 26 July 1931 proposed adopting a new name, Jehovah's witnesses, a deliberate break from the wider Bible Student movement Russell had founded, a movement that had by then grown disaffected with the leadership that followed him into the following decade.
What this succession changed for the movement's spread was identity itself, remade rather than merely inherited. A publishing effort begun by one man in 1879 and incorporated as a tract society in 1884 became, under a successor and a new name adopted in 1931, a distinct religious body separated from the broader Adventist and Bible Student currents it had grown out of, carrying forward under a name of its own choosing rather than its founder's.