Your Guide to Finding and Using City & County Directories
for Genealogical Research

Examples :

• 1928 Butte Montana
• typical city directory page
• abbreviations explained
• find the widows
• Did your ancestor run a business?
• When did Anthony Koscielniak die ?
• name of wife is listed in parentheses
• example of a map in a city directory
• 1837 Detroit
• Ann Arbor, Ypsi 1917

City directories can help locate an ancestor and you can often squeeze out quite a bit of inforamation. Here are some online guides to using city directories.

• The Board of Certification of Genealogists has a skill building page Analyzing City Directories
• Morgan. Along those lines: city directories by George Morgan V
• Vanderpool: City Directories, Windows on the Past
• Warren. Tips from the Pros: Comprehensive City Directory Coverage (the comments section also contains good advice and examples)
• This guide covers specifically the availablitiy of city directories on Ancestry.com, but also contains valuable general information.

Availability

There is a major microform set called City Directories of the United States", which is marketed to libraries and many libraries own portions; few own the whole set.

• The Allen County Library in Fort Wayne has a full set I believe -- if not a full set, they have a significant portion of it.
• The Library of Congress has this set and a page that lists holdings.

The place most likely to have book or film copies of city directories for a town is the public library of that town. Often state libraries and larger libraries will also have city directories for towns in that state. To find a library in the town you are researching, use LibWeb. In most cases the public libraries are the first place to check, but state and academic libraries also often have sets of city dircetories. The Bentley Library has many city directories for Michigan cities and towns

To find City Directories in the catalog of the Family History Library, search by locality, then check the topic "directories" -- remember, sometimes a directory will cover a county, but most often it will be listed under the city location. Here is a little more information on finding city directories in the catalog of the Family History Library.

Genealogy Research Associates offers a helpful site, that includes lists to available directories for various states, research guidance and a bibliography of resources: City Directories of the United States of America.. It is not yet complete, but the intention of this website is to " identify all printed, microfilmed, and online directories, and their repositories, for the United States.  This site will answer these questions: does a directory exist for a locality?  If it does, where can it be found?" I found few, if any, links to online directories. The list serves as an unofficial union list of City Directories. For many there is an option to order a lookup in the city directory by clicking the "order copy" icon on the right. The price of the lookups (plus shipping and handling) seem to me to be on the high end of a reasonable charge, but if all other efforts fail, it is good to know this service is available.

Some City Directories have been digitized on Google Books.

Some city directories are on subscription databases

• Ancestry.com (personal subscription or use in library that subscribes)
• Genealogy.com (personal subscription only).
• The content of Footnote.com includes City Directories.

There are a few searchable directories on Old Directories.com . This site also offers a list of some other city directories available online.

You can purchcase CDs of some old city directories.

There is a city directories mailing list for those who want to requeste lookups and are willing to do look-ups for this area.

Cyndi's List: City Directories