Goldmine: City Directories
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| City Vectors by Vecteezy |
How are city directories useful to us researchers? Aren't they just boring lines with a few names and sometimes, addresses?
They can be so much more, but even just the name and address, and sometimes job description and place of employment is by *year* and so if you have two people of the same name, you can follow them annually, and usually sort them out once you cross-check that data with census and other records. And don't forget to search for maps of the time so you can correlate the addresses to the house or apartment, and perhaps note the place of employment as well. Sanborn maps are particularly wonderful for this since it shows the layout of the house on the lot, and indicates how large it was, and how it was constructed.
However, noting just the bare minimum information misses the real value of city directories. After you gather all the information and write your citation, scan up and down the page, whether it is organized by address or alphabetical by name. Sometimes directories can be searched or browsed both ways, and you will find useful information in each. You may want to take a screen shot of the entire page, and file it away to re-examine once you know more about the family. The better you know the FAN club (Family/Friends, Associates, Neighbors), the better you know your family.
Browsing by address is a wonderful way to build out the FAN club of your ancestor or relative, because even in cities and towns, people often lived close to relatives, and their their children often befriended, worked with, worshipped with and married neighbors.
If you do not know the religion of your relative, look at what churches were close around, and note the names and addresses. If you are stuck on the family, research the church; you may notice the name of the ministers or priests in marriage records, baptisms, or conducting funerals. Obituaries can sometimes be found in church histories or other church records.
Look at what people in the neighborhood did for a living. Did many of them work in a steel plant? Or where your relatives surrounded by doctors, lawyers and other wealthy people? The beginning and end of directories often have keys to abbreviations, maps, short histories of neighborhoods, sub-directories, etc. Some were divided by race, and often there is a separate section for business listings. If the place of employment is listed, finding that business listing (or advertisement) can tell you a lot about your relative's day-to-day life.
If you plot what you find on a timeline, you can note changes in life circumstances, see the city change, and the how the life of the family changed as the children grew up, found employment, and started their own families. You might an approximate date of death or divorce - men still named, while the wife is noted as widowed. Remember that there is always a lag time between the year of publication and when all this information was obtained or updated; up to a year.
To find City Directories online, search all the big providers; Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and MyHeritage.com all have large indexed collections. If you don't subscribe to Ancestry or MyHeritage, see if your local library has access. Sometimes you will have to visit the library and log into your library account to gain access. Your local FamilySearch Center also has free access to many of these databases.
https://digitalarchives.wa.gov/Record/View/1929A9B1B47F44AAC7FEAB352C11BCE3
Don't forget the libraries in the cities and towns where you are researching. Again, many of these local resources are available to you online, and with others, you might be able to call or email the library and get digital copies of the pages and years of interest emailed to you. The Fiske Library has a wonderful collection of the Seattle City Directories, and the Seattle Public Library used to have many as well. University libraries and state libraries sometimes also have copies.
PS: I wish we had found this video before publishing, but it is worthwhile if you want to dig more deeply into all the ways city directories can help your research. "City Directories May Resolve Family History Conundrums" by Marilyn Thomsen.
The census enumeration districts for Spokane in the 1900, 1910 and 1920 used the voting precincts that were listed in the city directories. The last year the voting precincts were listed in the city directories was 1927, so they were not used in the 1930 and later census.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that comment, Anonymous! Other cities might have done the same.
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