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.