U.S. City Directories

Source Information

This database is a collection of directories of various cities and counties in the U.S., for various years. Generally a city directory will contain an alphabetical list of its citizens, listing the names of the heads of households, their addresses, and occupational information. Sometimes the wife's name will be listed in parentheses or italics following the husband's. Other helpful information that you will sometimes find includes dates of deaths of individuals who had been listed in the previous year's directory, the names of partners of firms, and the forwarding addresses or post offices of people who moved to another town.

To see what cities and years are currently available, view the browse table to the right. Begin by selecting a state, then city or county of interest. Once you do that you'll be able to see all the years that are currently available for that city. Use the page forward function in the image viewer to page to the table of contents. This will help you to learn what types of information are available in the directory. The collection is also searchable as a whole and you can narrow your search by including a location and year.

Why use city directories?

City directories are very useful for placing people in a particular place at a particular time. They typically tell you where an ancestor lived and worked and can be useful in locating your ancestor in census years. Check nearby churches and cemeteries, as well as municipalities to locate records that were created while they lived at that location.

What is in a city directory?

There are usually several parts to a city directory. The section of most interest to the genealogist, of course, is the alphabetical listing of names, for it is there that you may find your ancestor.

In addition to the alphabetical portion, a city directory may also contain a business directory, street directory, governmental directory, and listings of town officers, schools, societies, churches, post offices, and other miscellaneous matters of general and local interest. These sections can help you become more familiar with the city or county in which your ancestor resided. If your ancestor owned a business, be sure to check the business section for advertisements.

Whenever you use a directory, it is important to refer to the page showing abbreviations used in the alphabetical section of the directory. Some abbreviations are quite common, such as h for home or r, indicating residence. There may even be a subtle distinction between r for residents who are related to the homeowner and b for boarders who are not related. Becoming familiar with these abbreviations will help you better interpret your ancestor’s listing.

Some city directories list adult children who lived with their parents, but were working or going to school. Look for persons of the same surname residing at the same address. If analyzed and interpreted properly, these annual directories can tell you (by implication) which children belong to which household, when they married and started families of their own, and when they established themselves in business.

Now what?

Once an ancestor has been found in a city directory, there are several ways the information can be used to gain access to, or link with, such sources as censuses, death and probate records, church records, naturalization records, and land records.

Please note: The way these directories were originally filmed, a directory for a particular year may span two microfilm rolls - the first part of the directory appears at the end of one roll and the end of the directory appears at the beginning of the next roll. Unfortunately, this problem has been replicated in our browse tables. This means that you may need to look at two "Year" browse entries to view a complete directory. For example, the first part of a 1942 directory may appear in the browse entry labeled "1941-1942". The second part of the directory would then appear in the browse entry labeled "1942-1943".