How To Use Ancestry City Directories Like A Pro Genealogist

Don’t overlook Ancestry City Directories in your research! Here’s how to mine the often mundane data in them like a pro genealogist! Squeezing every last drop of information out of City Directories can be tedious for sure; however, you can make major breakthroughs with what I will show you.

Ancestry City Directories are like the parable of the elephant where a blind man was asked to identify what he was touching: different parts of the elephant let him to postulate different conclusions without ever identifying the whole.

It’s a part to whole thing! One year in a City Directory might not tell you much, but over a 10 or 20 year span it can open up pachyderm-like avenues of information. In the same vein, check out my wildly successful article “10 Tips For Researching Census, City Directories, and Street Guides.”

First of all, the ancestor you are researching must have lived in an area, and in a time period, where City Directories where kept. For example, for the one side of my family who were farmers living in rural Texas and Tennessee, City Directories did not exist. However, even then I was still able to find a widowed spouse on a Dallas, TX City Directory who had moved there to live with her daughter.

What can be kind of off-putting is that on sites like Ancestry, City Directories can clog up your search results and all seem very samey. What further drives me nuts is that the dates of the Ancestry City Directories in search results aren’t in chronological order and they don’t offer up much on first glance. I’ll show you how to work past that!

Here’s how to use Ancestry City Directories like a pro genealogist:

1. Stay organized, make a year-by-year reference list;
2. Add each City Directory to your ancestor’s timeline on Ancestry WITH the address;
3. Search by year, even if Ancestry doesn’t have a search result for that year;
4. Check if the City Directory has a Street Directory;
5. Check under alternate spellings if you don’t find someone;
6. Look for other family names on each City Directory listing;
7. Look for biographical information on each City Directory;
8. Always make sure the person you are tracking is your ancestor and not someone else!

Here’s an example of #1, a year-by-year reference list that I used successfully.

This is a year-by-year reference list that I made for an ancestor I was trying to find out more information on. Specifically: (1) when did his wife pass away?; and (2) was the Petition for Naturalization record I had his or not?

There were SO many City Directory results for this person so I listed every year I knew him to be in the city I was researching and then proceeded to go through EACH year (from 1891 – 1954), noting his address and others on the page around him. It was super tedious but I hit pay dirt, big time!

Ancestry didn’t have all of the years on its search results, its search algorithms aren’t perfect, you know. However, when you are looking at an Ancestry City Directory record you can change the fields, such as the year, and search back or ahead on your own. Doing this I also found that some (not all!) Ancestry City Directories have a separate section where they list residents by street address – it will list all of the people living street-by-street and were contemporaneous neighbors.

This can be an invaluable research tool. For me, it was how I surmised my grandparents met: they were neighbors in their late teens!

I cannot overstate enough the importance of adding each City Directory to your ancestor’s Ancestry timeline noting the address in either the comments box or using the location feature. You will thank me later if you do this! Otherwise you won’t be able to make sense of this mess:

Numbers 6 and 7 on my list (Look for other family names on each City Directory listing & Look for biographical information on each City Directory) are of the utmost importance and really where your research skills will become like the pros. Listing information is one thing, but extrapolating what you find from that information is another altogether! This is the mind of a true researcher!

For example, with the ancestor I was researching I was able to estimate when his wife passed away as no other information was available online. Using only information from Ancestry City Directories, I surmised she died sometime around 1943 based on the fact that she was not listed as a spouse after 1942.

In another case, for a great-grand uncle, his City Directory listing informed me that in 1916 he returned to Lithuania! For another ancestor a City Directory listing had the person’s exact death date in there. You never know what you’ll get, so search out each year and look that information over very carefully.

It’s also a good idea to see who else is listed under your ancestor’s surname at the same address. You may find new family members or be able to tell family members with the same names a part from one another using this technique.

Using Ancestry City Directories allowed me to finally confirm that the Petition for Naturalization I had was actually my ancestor’s. The Petition had a strange address: 55 Filmore St., which I did not associate with him. Most of his City Directory listings had him and his family at 63 Market St. After carefully searching EVERY City Directory between 1891 and 1954, I found him, in the same year he was granted citizenship, living at 55 Filmore St – even though Ancestry never correlated this information. Boom!

It was the breakthrough I needed, I hit pay dirt! I pieced the timeline together and concluded that my ancestor’s wife passed away in 1943, he then moved to this 55 Filmore address (for whatever reason) and, with a sad sense of irony, was granted citizenship the following year. I also checked his prior address in the City Directory and found that in 1944 it was vacant, finally confirming the facts.

The U.S. City Directories national database is also a wonderfully rich source of genealogical information if you know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you practice my techniques you can also use Ancestry City Directories like a pro genealogist.