City Directories and Their Use in Genealogical Research - Susan Dress

Have you looked at the Port Clinton, Ohio Directories in our G&LH section? We have copies of directories for several years between 1960 and 1973, shelved under 977.1212 PORT [year]. These directories include a preface with information on the community; a buyer’s guide and classified business directory; a numerical telephone directory; a telephone street guide and householder’s directory (a list of all streets in the postal zip code, with names of householders by address and phone numbers, if available); and a resident directory.

The telephone street guide would be helpful if you were trying to remember the names of people who lived on your street when you were growing up, or the name of the shop you used to visit on Madison St. years ago.

The resident directory has a wealth of information packed into it. According to the explanation on page 3, listings may include spouse name, number of children under 18, if the householder owns or rents, and place of employment or occupation. Interesting note of the times: married women ‘engaged in some responsible occupation’ are listed individually in addition to their regular listing with husband; and in the case of a ‘natural’ widow, the name of the deceased husband is included in parentheses, whenever possible.

We only have a handful of directories here, but more can be found at other libraries, and online. Searching our library system for the title ‘city directory’, keyword search, gives 313 results. Most of them are in reference sections of the libraries, so you would have to make a road trip to use them.

According to the Library of Congress: “City directories are among the most important sources of information about urban areas and their inhabitants. They provide personal and professional information about a city's residents as well as information about its business, civic, social, religious, charitable, and literary institutions. ...City directories are compiled through door-to-door surveys and are published at irregular intervals.”

Ancestry.com, available free to patrons while in the library, will let you browse city directories by location/city/state/year. Their collection contains not just US