There are directories, and then there are directories! Usually we rely on city directories to find information about our ancestors, but there are also other directories that may provide clues to your ancestors’ lives.
City Directories
City directories are a treasure trove of information for genealogists, fleshing out the lives of your ancestors with the places they lived, where they worked, who else was living with them at the time and other tidbits of information that may not be found elsewhere.
A list of the Canadian directories that are available online for free can be found at the Genealogy à la carte website.
Another site that is extremely helpful is Miriam Robbins’ site, Online Historical Directories, containing a list of many places where you can find online city, county, and other directories. Some are at free websites; others are at subscription sites. Some have digitized images of the directories, and others are merely transcriptions. This is a work in progress, so it is not complete by any means, but it will definitely be useful in your research.
Newspaper Directories
Newspaper directories were sold to advertisers who were looking for places to promote their goods and services. They provided brief descriptions of the newspapers and the towns where they were published.
American and Canadian newspapers
Advertisers learned back in the day (and what genealogists can learn today) from a newspaper directory:
- Names of newspapers published in a city or town
- Frequency of a newspaper
- Circulation statistics
- Number of pages
- Population of the town
- Major industry or business
- Name of railroad or river that ran through the town.
There were two major newspaper directories during the late 19th and early 20th centuries,Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory and N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory.
The US Library of Congress has compiledthirty-four digitized Rowell’s and Ayer’s American Newspaper Directories, from 1875 to 1920, – but here’s the good news for genealogists north of the US border. These American directories include Canadian newspapers published at the time. In the case of the 1884 directory, forty-eight states, eight provinces and the Northwest Territories can be found in the Index in the first pages. Then, you can take a look at their ad.
The circulation numbers are indicated in the newspaper description by a letter of the alphabet, such as B or J. To understand what these represent, look at the Key to Circulation Rankings after the title page of the directory. For example, B means the circulation did not exceed 50,000 and J means the circulation did not exceed 1,000.
If your ancestors owned a business, look at the Index of Advertisers. You may find their name among the hundreds who advertised each year.
Once you identify which newspapers were available in a particular town, you can Google the newspaper name to find out if it has been digitized, visit your local library for microfilm copies, look at Library and Archives Canada’s website to find out if they have microfilm copies, and/or visit the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America for digitized US newspapers.
Of course we are not only researching in Canada and the United States. There are also directories to be found for other countries.
FamilySearchWiki provides a list of directories in England and Wales. The publication of directories, originally alphabetical lists of the names and addresses of tradesmen, was very much a consequence of the growth of permanent shopping and trading centres in the 18th century.
If you are searching for directories in other countries, use Google to find sites that may have listings of directories. A simple Goodle search using the term Historical United Kingdom Directories found several helpful sites.
Lastly, Ancestry.com or their other sites (Ancestry.ca, Ancestry.co.uk, etc.) have very large collections of directories that may be helpful in your research endeavours.
Good luck!
Sources:
Genealogy à la carte
Miriam Robbins online directories
Google
FamilySearch.org