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 alpha...

By Linda Blais At our June meeting, Mary Kathryn Kozy gave us some practical tips for preparing to take a genealogy research trip.  Listening to Mary brought back memories of the last research trip I took to North Carolina and Tennessee with my cousin who acted as my research assistant. It also brought up some "aha" or "oops" moments on a couple of things that didn't go quite as planned, even though I had spent months preparing my itinerary. Here are some basics about the trip. My goal was to visit as many historical sites, libraries, museums, courthouses and archives as I could in 10 days that were relevant to the life of Sarah Barton Murphy, who lived in North Carolina as a child between 1753 and 1760 and in Tennessee as an adult between 1781 and 1802.  She is not my ancestor, but I am in the process of writing a biography about her. Her claim to fame is that she founded the first Sunday school west of the Mississippi in 1805. The research I do for an anc...