The section of most interest, of course, is the alphabetical listing of names, where you may find your ancestor. There are usually several parts to a city directory. They can also lead you to nearby churches, cemeteries, and municipalities, where you can look for more records created while your ancestor lived in this location. They typically tell you where an ancestor lived and worked and can help you locate ancestors in census years. Because this collection uses OCR technology, we encourage you to correct any errors you find in the data by going to the image and editing the name in the correction panel at the bottom of the page.Ĭity directories are useful for placing people in a particular place at a particular time. City Directories database is substantially better than the collection that has been available on Ancestry for several years under the same name. This collection was created using a new OCR indexing method that improves searching and results. When you access a directory, use the page forward function in the image viewer to find the table of contents so you can see what types of information are available in the directory. Once you do that you'll be able to see all the years currently available for that location. Begin by selecting a state, then city or county of interest. To see what cities and years are currently available, use the browse table to the right. Other helpful information might include death dates for individuals who had been listed in the previous year's directory, names of partners in firms, and forwarding addresses or post offices for people who had moved to another town. Sometimes a wife's name will be listed in parentheses or italics following the husband's. Generally a city directory will contain an alphabetical list of citizens, listing the names of the heads of households, their addresses, and occupational information.

The database currently contains directories for all states except Alaska.

This database is a collection of directories for U.S.

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