Use City and County Directories in Your Genealogy Research

Long before the popularity of telephones and telephone books, urban communities listed their residents in city directories and rural communities often had county directories as well. For many areas, publication began in the early to mid-1800s and continued well into the twentieth century. City directories are especially helpful in tracking city dwellers, who often did not own property and may have changed residences more frequently than those who lived in the country. Like phone books, both city and county directories have multiple sections in which you can find listings of people, non-profit organizations and businesses, and many interesting paid advertisements. Best of all, directories were often issued yearly, so they can help fill in the gaps between censuses.

Luckily for those of us who do genealogy, many of these directories still exist and are widely available, sometimes in original book form or on microfilm, and, more and more, digitized and online. City and county directories are essential to locate addresses, learn about occupations, establish relationships, and even track migration and death.

What might you learn?

• For each adult male, you will get a home address and occupation, sometimes a name of employer, and a work address.
• Employed women and older children who are working may be listed.
• Wives and young adults began to show up in directories in the early 1930s.
• You may see women listed as widows, families that have relocated (often with the new location), and even people who were listed and then marked as deceased, since data was usually collected at least a year prior to publication.

In addition:

• Some directories were for businesses only and have many advertisements and lists of tradesmen.
• Some are called reverse or “crisscross” directories. In these, people are listed by street address so you can build a picture of who was living on a particular block.
• Almost all directories contain maps, lists of organizations, houses of worship, ward boundaries, and more.
• Multiple companies produced city and county directories so you may find more than one for a given year in a city. These may not be exactly the same due to time differences in assembling the data and printing it.

County directories

Many counties published directories, although they may not have appeared as frequently as city directories and some were more business-oriented. Counties also published county histories, which can be filled with biographical information on ordinary people. Although a good source of hard-to-find information, often the biographies were submitted by family members without any sources or fact-checking and were written to show the subject in the very best light. So be careful in using those as definitive sources.

How to interpret a directory page

Each directory uses a set of abbreviations to conserve space, and the key to understanding them is most often found in the front of the book. Be sure you locate and use that page to interpret any abbreviation you might not understand.

Here is a portion of a page from a 1939 St. Louis County directory. Note the following in the brown circles:

1. Frances Murphy, widow of James
2. James B. Murphy, with wife Dorothy, and James E, whose wife is Ann
3. Robert E., with wife Angela, and another Robert E., who is a student
4. Thomas, a cook at Nine-O-Five liquor stores restaurant

How many other details can you learn, just from the people on this page? Note the occupations, family relationships, home addresses, and more. Imagine if you were trying to sort your Murphy ancestors who had similar names how helpful this information might be!

Where can you find St. Louis and Missouri directories?

In book and microfilm format: 

• Missouri Historical Society’s Library and Research Center
• St. Louis County Library Headquarters
• St. Louis Genealogical Society Reference Room
• St. Louis Public Library Downtown

Online: 

• The Missouri State Archives and the Mercantile Library in St. Louis have collaborated in digitizing directories. Use the links below to access both websites.

Mercantile Library: https://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu//umsl/islandora/object/umsl:2640

Missouri Digital Heritage: https://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh/CityDirectories

If your ancestors were from other states, city and county directories are widely available. FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, as well as other websites, have city and county directories from Missouri and many other locations. Also, check into the individual states in which your family resided for directories, both in print and online. Happy hunting!