City Directories

Old city directories can be a great resource for genealogical research. 

City directories were kind of like phone books. But unlike phone books, these city directories were sold to businesses. They were quite pricy. For example, the cost of the Louisville City Directory for 1930 was $20. These directories were used by business to find customers. But today they can provide a lot of information about our ancestors and the cities where they lived.

Typically city directories had a few sections to them, such as:

• General information about the city
• The biggest part of the city directory was the listing of residents. This was much like the white pages of phone books.
• There typically was a section like the yellow pages of phone books, with a listing of businesses by category. This isn't of too much interest for genealogy though.
• Usually there was a  street directory. That was a listing of street addresses and who lived there or what business was there.

Additionally, city directories often listed the person's occupation and employer. Some noted whether the listee owned their residence.

Today, many of these old city directories have been scanned and are available online through libraries and genealogy sites.

I have gathered a ton of information about my ancestors in Detroit and Louisville through city directories. I have found where they lived, who lived with who, where they worked, etc. I found so much information that I needed to create a spreadsheet to organize all of the data.

Genealogy Website Kickoff

Introduction

At the Family Brown Reunion on May 21, 2022, I presented a bunch of family history stuff, and I said that I would be putting that stuff together to share with the family. It's been more than two months since then, but I have been very busy, and spent a lot of time working on this. I am not completely satisfied with what I've done so far, but I figure that it is better to get it out there and see what people think about it.

I have been trying to figure out how to share this information and how to post my new findings. I think that I have come up with some ways to do this. But there is still a lot of work to do, but I want to get some of this stuff posted to share with the family.

I plan to create 4 family sites, one for each of our family trees. For me that is Brown and Wacenske; and for Dawn that is Weyer and Gulyas. At this point, I have only worked on the Brown family; the other three will come later. There will also be a General Topics page (that is where this post is located).

Below are the items that have been posted on the Wacenske.com website for the Brown family.

Blog

This is where I will post new findings and other items of interest. Blog postings will show up on the main Family page and on Blogger. You can post comments and feedback, however you will need to sign in to Blogger to do so. Blogger is a Google product, so you can use your Google account. You can also subscribe to a blog to be updated on new posts. I encourage you to leave comments. This will be how I know there is interest in this stuff and that will help to keep me going.

Files

I am using Google Drive to host genealogical documents and images, such as birth, marriage and death certificates, and census records. This will be accessible through the website, and you will be able to view and download the files. Files are organized in Surname folders and then there is a folder for each person. The files are named with the year, type of document, location, and person's name. Since these files are open to the public, files will not be available for living people. However, if you would like access to the files of the living, I can grant access to you if you log in to Google.

Photos

I will use Google Photos to host the family photos that I have. Again, this will be accessible through the website. I still have a lot of work to do on the photos to get the files named, tagged, and captioned. This may take a while to complete. There will also be a way for family members to upload family photos to share.

Family Tree

This is where I have spent the most time trying to figure out how to share our family history. I started using Family Search for my genealogy research and database, but I found some shortcomings. I decided I needed more control over the data. After a lot of research into genealogy software, I decided to use Roots Magic 8. One cool feature of RM is that it can create and host a website based on the information from my database. I created a website through RM and linked to it on the Wacenske.com site.

There are several ways to look at the information on the family tree site. The Pedigree Chart shows the ancestors of the selected person. If you click on a person's name, then you will see the Individual Details for that person. There is also a Name Index to help navigate to the person of interest.

Since these family tree pages are public, information about the living is not shown to protect their privacy. But the good thing about the pages being public is that no log in is required to view the information and the site acts as cousin bait, meaning that long lost cousins may find this information and contact us.

If we want to created a locked site with information about our living family members (with their permission of course), we can do that. I'll wait to hear if anyone is interested in doing that.

Conclusion

I truly hope that some of you find this interesting. Please provide me with feedback. I have spent many, many hours on this and I hope that others enjoy it. And hopefully I will get some feedback and comments to guide me in my future endeavors. You can provide feedback by Posting a Comment below.