When searched creatively, city directories are magnificent genealogical research tools. If you have ever consulted city directories, you know how indispensable they are as resources for tracing a family's history. If you are new to them, you are about to discover a gold mine. Because city directories were published annually, they can be especially useful in locating ancestors, discovering facts about their lives, and finding leads to other genealogical records.
As a professional genealogist, specializing in New York City family history, I often recommend to my clients that a search for ancestors begin with city directories. New York City directories were first published in 1786 and continued annually, with few interruptions, until 1933.
Not all city directories share such a long history, but most feature a main section of alphabetized listings of the names of heads of households and other residents, similar to our present-day telephone books. Unlike our phone books, however, city directories offer additional information, such as a person's occupation and business address.
A typical city directory might also include the following sections:
Back I went to my city directory notes. I found someone with an alternative
spelling of the family surname and an unrecognizable first name at the
109th Street address in Trow's Directory for 1909-the only year in a twenty-year
span in which that person appeared in a New York City directory. It was
a slim thread to hang on to, but I rechecked the naturalization indexes
to follow this name. And there was his card in the Supreme Court naturalization
indexes for 1916, with his address on East 109th Street. The records gave
us not only the family's town of origin in Italy, but also the name and
date of arrival of the ship he took to New York. That passenger list from
1892, a year unindexed in New York City ship arrivals, included the names
of my client's ancestor, who turned out to be the brother of the naturalized
man, and several other family members. These were major finds from one
line in a city directory.
Part I: Locating Ancestors
Searching digitized city directories by name or address can tell you where your ancestors lived, where they moved, and who lived with whom.
One of the greatest uses of city directories is as guides-often the only leads-to finding families in federal and state censuses. As most family researchers are dismayed to discover, not every family is listed in federal census soundexes or indexes. And few state censuses are indexed. In these cases, city directories provide the address necessary to locate the family in the correct ward, district, or division in the census.
The opportunity to search by address in digitized directories, which in essence transforms every directory into a "reverse" directory, opens up extraordinary research possibilities that will appeal to even the most experienced researchers. A reverse directory lists residents not alphabetically, but by address, and can help researchers re-create neighborhoods and find relatives with different surnames in the same building or neighborhood.
This type of search enables the genealogist to zero in on the census enumerator's route to find ancestors who are not listed in census indexes. Let's say you know a family lived at 138 Greenwich Street in Manhattan from 1845 to 1855, but you can't find those ancestors in an 1850 census index. Enumerators went from house to house questioning residents, depending on the census year, about their names, ages, family relationships, and other data. If only the canvassing of Greenwich Street had been done in numerical order, your task of spotting the enumeration page for those unindexed ancestors would be easy. But it's not! Enumerators' paths zigzagged through neighborhoods, turning unexpected corners here, crossing streets there, stymieing the researcher. So you have no choice but to pore patiently over enumeration pages for the entire first ward in the 1850 federal census for New York County. Or do you?
Not if you search a digitized or "reverse" city directory.
Look in the street-directory section of the 1850-51 city directory for Greenwich Street. You'll see that the buildings located at 134 to 142 Greenwich Street were situated on the left side of the block between Cedar and Liberty Streets. Pick an address next door to your ancestors' home at 138 Greenwich and be sure to stay on the same block and side of the street as your ancestors-for example, 140 Greenwich. Then search the digitized directory for that address to find the names of the residents.
Next, search for one of those neighbors in the census index. If you find the neighbor, search for your ancestor on the same page in the census enumeration where the neighbor appears or, if needed, on adjoining pages. Chances are good that you will find your missing ancestor's enumeration and have saved yourself hours of painstaking research.
Sometimes, American city directories can lead you to places in other parts of the world. Puzzled that a German-American family was missing from the 1880 New York State soundex, I found my answer in Trow's New York City Directories for 1879-81. The listings for the head of household, a diamond merchant, included his business address in New York City, and his home residence-in Europe. He and his young family had relocated to Amsterdam, where he was establishing a branch office for his diamond business. That find also cleared up the mystery of why no 1880 birth record could be found in New York City for the middle child of the family. While her older and younger siblings, born in 1876 and 1883 respectively, each had a birth certificate issued in Manhattan, the middle child did not-because she had been born in Amsterdam.
City directories are also among the best sources for locating female ancestors. Finding female ancestors in census indexes is almost impossible, unless the woman was a head of household. City directories, however, frequently include listings for women who owned their own businesses, as well as women who were widows and heads of households.
One client had no idea of the name of the woman who had married her
great-great-great- grandfather Alexander or when Alexander had died. I
began by tracing his city directory listings from the 1830s. In 1844, his
listing disappeared. But the next year, at the same address where he had
lived, was the entry "Mary, widow Alexander." Further research confirmed
that Mary was my client's great-great-great- grandmother and that Alexander
had died in 1842.
Part II: Discovering Facts about Ancestors' Lives
More than cold compilations of data, city directories can open many doors regarding our ancestors and lead to details about occupations, marriages, or other aspects of their day-to-day lives. A client, for example, wanted to know what her Irish-American ancestor did for a living. A city directory listed him as a successor to another man's metals company. Who was this other man, and what was their relationship? Looking at city directories, as well as censuses and probate materials, I discovered that my client's ancestor was the executor of the previous owner's estate and his son-in-law.
Did your ancestors own property? Check city directories. If a family lived at the same address for several years, they may have owned the property. Use the address from city directories to search real-estate records for deeds, mortgages, and other documents, which can contain information about family relationships, death dates, addresses, occupations, financial details, and more.
Addresses from city directories can also lead you to discoveries about your ancestors' financial holdings. Knowing where they lived-in which ward-will allow you to search tax lists indicating their holdings in real-estate and personal property. One of my clients wanted to know whether his ancestor owned property in New York City around 1816. A search of the tax lists showed that the man did not own property but lived as a boarder in another man's home.
City directories are invaluable resources in the search for vital records. I have already mentioned how the appearance of the word "widow" in a city directory listing can lead to the approximate death date of the husband. City directories can also offer clues about ancestors' marriage and birth dates.
A client's ancestor first appeared in an 1867 city directory. We knew the names of his parents and that he was approximately twenty-two years old at the time, but little else. Why would he have moved out of his family's residence? A search of marriage records revealed that he had married and set up a separate household with his bride. The marriage certificate included the names of his bride and her parents. A search through the next couple of years of birth indexes led to the first birth certificate of the following generation. Again, one listing in a city directory gave us several results.
The register section (sometimes called appendix) of a city directory can tell you, among other details, if your ancestors were officers of clubs, societies, or businesses, or were officials in specific religious institutions. A client knew her great-great-grandfather was a Freemason, probably an officer. But we didn't know his position or affiliation. I searched the register under the heading "Secret and Benefit Societies" and then "Masonic" and spotted his name listed as secretary of the Scottish Rite.
City directories can also indicate when an ancestor first immigrated
to the United States or moved to a particular city. A tailor I was researching
first appeared in Brooklyn directories in 1853. My client knew that her
ancestor had been in Austria until 1850 or later, but she had no idea of
the date of his immigration. The city directory listing helped limit the
immigration date to sometime between 1850 and 1853 and thus eliminated
an extensive search of many years of unindexed passenger arrivals. We found
him listed in the manifest of a ship that docked on New York shores in
1852.
Part III: Finding Leads to Other Genealogical Records
City directories can guide you around brick walls in your genealogical research. The data from a directory can help direct you to other genealogical sources, some of which I've mentioned, such as vital records, immigration/emigration and naturalization records, passenger lists, census enumerations, property and financial records, and more. Among the other records city directories can open for the researcher are court and religious records, some of the most reliable sources of genealogical information.
A client's great-great-great-great-grandfather disappeared from Brooklyn city directories after 1845 and had perhaps died. We didn't know his parents' names or his place of birth in France. As death certificates weren't required at that time, I knew that I wouldn't be able to find one in order to obtain more data. So I looked for a will and found it at Kings County Surrogate's Court. Although the probate didn't include his parents' names, it did list addresses and relationships of family members in Strasbourg, where, I later confirmed, he had been born.
If you discover from city directory listings the likelihood that your ancestor owned his or her own business (Samuel Eichberg's listing, for instance, included a reference to Eichberg & Company), you can then search for incorporation records and annual reports containing the names, addresses, and signatures of your ancestor and associates. And be sure as well to search directories for any advertisements for your ancestors' companies. I once found a two-page ad for a client's great-great-great-grandfather's business that included details about the company and portraits of the five brothers who ran it.
Religious records also can be wonderful sources of family information, especially when civil vital records can't be located. If you know your ancestor's religion, you can check the register section of city directories for religious institutions in the neighborhood, then contact that institution or its successor for records about your family.
A client's great-grandparents were married in a hotel by a rabbi in 1911, according to their marriage certificate. The certificate listed the rabbi's place of residence, but not his synagogue, information that we wanted for further research. A search for the rabbi in the city directory of that year gave us his home address, which matched the address on the marriage certificate. The listing also included his work address, which we hoped would be the address of his temple. I checked the synagogue listings in the city directory, and there was the name of the temple at the rabbi's work address. The synagogue was still in existence and had extensive records about the family.
In my job as a genealogist, I greatly enjoy the detective work of searching in archives and libraries for information about the lives of my clients' ancestors. Much of the time, the trail to those repositories begins with city directories.
* Notes on Contributor
A Manhattan native, Leslie Corn is a New York City-based professional genealogist specializing in New York City family research and heir searches. Leslie is a New York Genealogical and Biographical Society genealogist, working in the "G&B" Record Search Service and serving on its Library Committee and Collection Development Subcommittee. Leslie is also the Jewish Genealogical Society's Co-Chair of Repositories for its 1999 International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. In addition, Leslie sits on the Nominating Committee for the 1999 Executive Council of the Jewish Genealogical Society. Leslie volunteers at the New York County Clerk's Office/Hall of Records. She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and is a frequent contributor to the NYC-ROOTS mailing list. You can reach Leslie Corn via e-mail at LeslieCorn@aol.com.
THE HISTORIAN'S CRAFT:
Consulting City Directories
by Daniel J. Walkowitz**
Historian & Director of Metropolitan
Studies at New York University
City directories are research tools with especially useful applications for historians. Published annually from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, city directories listed the names of residents and businesses of a particular city. In short, the city directory functioned as an earlier, comprehensive version of the telephone book. Beyond providing an alphabetical listing of names, city directories typically noted an individual's occupation, work place, or business, and sometimes religion, race, and gender. Most directories listed heads of households, usually male, unless a widow replaced her husband. City directories also listed the members of a city's civic and religious organizations, philanthropies, clubs, and associations as well as the names of local public officials. With this stockpile of information, the social or urban historian can attempt to reconstruct the social and cultural history of an individual, a social group, or a neighborhood.
The Promotional Aspects of City Directories: Advertising
Publishers of city directories capitalized on people's desire to see their names in print. Listing one's name or business in a directory was a source of pride and an example of self- promotion. The human desire for social acceptance and approbation is an important motivator of behavior, and it is understandable how the city directory became a marker of social status. Traditional American blue bloods-Protestant elites or community leaders who had been in the country for generations-took pride in being listed in their own social registers. As manufacturing, banking, and commerce created new forms of wealth, entrepreneurs, aspiring shopkeepers, salespeople, and immigrants, for instance, sought to display their own signs of status. The city directory functioned as a common man's social register. To be listed was to mark one as a person of note. Dependents -- wives and children -- and the unemployed were usually excluded from the listings. In many cases the listings set a shifting cultural boundary between men who worked and men who did not, along with women, children and the mentally ill.
The directories were also business ventures. City directories arose as publishing entrepreneurs responded to the needs of shopkeepers and consumers to conduct business. In the bustling nineteenth-century town or city, where it was impossible for everyone to know one another, as in pre-industrial times, the city directory allowed business people and customers to find each other, thus helping the market economy work.
Publishers sold advertising space, for example, for local products and services. The advertisements were just as important to business owners and consumers as they were to publishers. Touting the latest product lines and places to shop and vacation, advertisements help historians understand changing consumer tastes and needs over time. For example, ads for some products, such as cast-iron stoves, iceboxes, chamber pots, or many patent medicines disappeared as the need or desire for such products waned. Early advertisements, moreover, highlight the origins of the contemporary problem of obsolescence, affecting the growth, transformation, or demise of a city's industries and workforce. Of course, other advertised products still are used, and they are no less interesting to the historian for what they suggest about the development and endurance of certain consumer patterns. By studying advertisements historians demonstrate the emergence of the "commodified self," that is, people's display of themselves and their achievements through the material accouterments of modern life.
In addition, art historians and social historians analyze the iconography and rhetoric of advertisements for what they reveal about the aesthetics (and ethics) of the emerging advertising industry. The historian can also find promotional information about the city itself. In twentieth- century city directories, for example, local Chambers of Commerce, public agencies, hotels, and resorts placed advertisements in city directories. A town with a spa could advertise the healthful benefits of its mineral water, the safe condition of its roads for travel, the comforts of local resorts, and so forth. Directories also played an integral part in nineteenth-century urban boosterism. Publishers of early city directories gave prominence to the index of city officials, including police officers and firefighters, as well as leaders of the city's philanthropies and religious, financial, and voluntary institutions.
Historiography and Methodology
The history of women and children, working people, immigrants, Native Americans, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among other social groups, has been at the center of a profound shift in much contemporary historical research, a shift away from political history and toward social and cultural history. In the past, historians who studied political, social, or economic elites-the people who controlled political institutions, newspapers, think tanks, and corporations, for example-could easily locate information about their subjects in the form of memoirs, biographies, correspondence, business archives, minutes of board meetings, annual reports, newspapers, and so on. In contrast, social historians face enormous challenges. How can one construct histories of people who left behind few if any written records? City directories are one of many sources that make it possible to tell the story of the everyday life of the factory worker, the soldier, the tailor, the merchant, or the advocate of women's suffrage. Urban historians, in particular, trace people from one directory to another to learn about geographic, generational, and occupational mobility. Did people live in the same neighborhood during most of their adult life, or did they move frequently? Which social classes moved and when? How did different occupational and ethnic groups experience social mobility? Did children follow their parents' career paths? How did the second and third generations experience social and geographic mobility? And how did the experiences of ethnic and racial groups compare from generation to generation?
For the social historian, whose goal is to capture the experience of an ordinary individual from the past, the city directory is invaluable. After finding the names of individuals in a particular city directory membership list, such as that from a church, suffrage group, trade union, or fire company, the historian can look up these names in the listing of residents to find the individuals' home addresses and occupations. Historians can also use maps in the city directory to locate people in neighborhoods and political districts (for example, city wards). The urban historian can then measure the geographic distance between the neighborhoods of particular social groups, such as factory workers and the managers and owners who employed them. The urban historian also looks to the map to determine where people lived in relation to the downtown, the town hall, and the social and cultural institutions serving the city, such as men's clubs, charities, and museums. The historian who consults the directories of a particular city, over a span of twenty to thirty years, can trace the movement of individuals in and out of specific neighborhoods and note changes in their or their children's work history. From there the historian can use other sources, such as the federal and state censuses-but only up until 1920 or 1925. Thereafter they are inaccessible due to privacy laws. After the mid-1920s the city directory is the principal, if not the only, source for gleaning demographic, social, and economic information. Using both the city directory and censuses, the historian can try to piece together the life and activities of an ordinary person. By compiling a series of social profiles of several city residents, moreover, the historian can try to show how that city's social and political networks operated.
The U.S. Census for Population was first taken in 1790 and decennially thereafter, while state censuses, such as those done by New York, were taken on years ending in five (for example, 1845, 1855, and so on). These federal and state snapshots provide statistics on households, family members and their relationship to the head of household, occupation, country of birth, value of property, and other data. The problem with using censuses, however, is that households are arranged according to their location in a political ward. Before consulting the census, researchers have to know the street address of the individual in question and the political ward or electoral district in which he or she lived. Without an address, it could be days before the researcher finds his individual in the census. But the city directory can provide a jump start.
By referring to the directory, the researcher can find the address of a particular individual. Working forward and backward over time, the researcher can follow this individual through the years. In addition, city directory maps can help pinpoint the city ward in which an individual resides. Since censuses are organized by wards, the historian can then turn to the U.S. Census and the appropriate state census to locate his individuals. The historian will find them amid their families, households, friends, and neighbors, and with priceless additional information about their age, birth rank, kinship network, ethnicity, marital status, and property holding.
The following example demonstrates how historians have used these tools. My book, Worker City, Company Town (University of Illinois Press, 1978), on the history of iron and cotton worker protest in mid-nineteenth-century Troy and Cohoes, New York, made extensive use of city directories. They allowed me, for example, to reconstruct the residential, employment, and family history of Dugald Campbell, a leader of the Troy iron molders union. Not surprisingly, Campbell did not leave any personal papers. By drawing information from the manuscript censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880, I was able to produce profiles of representative cotton and ironworker families in both Troy and Cohoes over a thirty-year period. The directories and censuses made it possible to contrast the profiles of these families with comparable portraits of the households of prominent iron manufacturers and textile moguls. Directories also helped clarify how the social cleavages and alliances, during Troy's industrial conflicts, played out geographically. During the labor violence of the 1870s, in which iron founders complained that "inefficient" police did not arrest militant striking ironworkers, the demographic data in the city directories helped me identify the people arrested, once I found them listed in police reports. Maps then showed how police and worker families lived in the same neighborhood and made for a community distinct from that in which the founders lived.
Methodological Advantages and Disadvantages
The city directory has some decided advantages over the censuses and our present-day telephone books. Like the White Pages, the city directory can help the researcher find where a person lives. Also, like the Yellow Pages, researchers can use the city directory to find the addresses of local repairpersons, retail stores, and service providers. But, the city directory, in its listings and advertisements, combines the services of the White and Yellow Pages, with one critical advantage: the directories list each person's occupation. They even often include women heads of household, who might not be regularly employed or in paid work, and might simply be labeled as widows. And unlike a census, the directory allows a researcher to follow a person every year, even as he or she moves about the city, and to trace kinfolk with the same surname.
The directories, however, do have shortcomings. Directories listed adults exclusively.
and were more likely to enumerate permanent employees, especially if male. Because these directories focused on heads of household, an unskilled male laborer was more likely to be listed than his wife or daughters, who perhaps worked in a textile mill. These deficiencies notwithstanding, the city directory allows researchers to open a window on the history of daily life-a window formerly kept shut until social historians found new methods to study new subjects: ordinary people.
The 1863 New York City Draft Riots, to this day the most violent and protracted riots in American history, offer a second illustration of how city directories can help social historians join personality to names. Were rioters, for example, engaged in social protest, with origins in dockyard disputes, between Irish working men and nonunion African Americans, or were they simply a senseless mob of racist young toughs, a profile not unlike that presented in popular media accounts of alienated youths in twentieth-century street gangs? Were they rooted in a particular community and supported by their families? Did wives and daughters join in the rioting, or were women more likely to participate when they lived as widows or were unmarried and living outside patriarchal households?
The directories and censuses cannot answer these questions, of course; they will, however, suggest answers and clarify the next set of questions the historian must ask. To wit: accounts of the draft riots will provide the names of police officers, militia, firemen, local politicians; and the daily police columns, moreover, will list people arrested for assault, prostitution, and theft. Armed with this information, the researcher can turn to the 1863 New York City directory to locate many of these people with a street address and an occupation. For example, a woman arrested during the riots might be described as a prostitute in a police report. But the city directory might list the woman as a seamstress. City directories, therefore, can help the historian remain critical of police reports or other primary sources. Furthermore, when the historian re-creates a series of individual profiles, it becomes possible to see whether a pattern of neighborhood ties exists. The historian's work will not be done, but names that were no more than ciphers will suddenly gain flesh.
Future Research Trends
Three trends in social and cultural history suggest that city directories will continue to be significant tools for researchers. First, much current work seeks to understand the multiple and contested social identities-class, ethnic, occupational, gender, national-that people draw upon in different historical circumstances to advance their interests. Directories provide a way to elucidate occupational and community identities, and, when cross-referenced with the census, ethnic and racial identities. Second, studies of the struggle to define and control public spaces, such as neighborhoods, streets, parks, and public buildings, depend on maps and demographic information, about the social structure of particular neighborhoods, that can be gleaned from city directories. Third, those writing histories of consumption can use advertisements in the directories in ways earlier suggested.
Developments in digitalization and multimedia put research tools, such as the city directories, at the disposal of this new agenda. Archival materials that once required costly and time-consuming research trips are now within reach of anyone with a personal computer. The accessibility and searchability of research tools, such as city directories, are integral to that transformation. The days of the quill pen, typewriter, and itinerant scholar are gone; with digitization and the information superhighway, historical research and writing will never be the same. Primary Source Media's online city directories are a part of that future, and the future is now.
* Notes on Contributor
Daniel J. Walkowitz, Professor of History and Director of the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University, has written widely on the labor and urban history of the United States. His book, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-1884 (University of Illinois Press, 1978) was the basis for the docudrama, The Molders Of Troy, which appeared on PBS in 1980. He subsequently directed, wrote and produced (with Barbara Abrash), Perestroika From Below, a documentary of the 1989 strike by coal miners in Donetsk, Ukraine (Channel 4, England, 1990). This video became the basis for his co-authored book (with Lewis Siegelbaum) on the Donetsk coal mining community from 1989 to 1992, Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992 (SUNY Press, 1995). His forthcoming book on social workers and the meaning of class in twentieth-century America, Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (University of North Carolina Press) will appear in early 1999.