It can be tempting to skip around when searching city directories. Don’t.
Look for your people in directories for every year. People get left out sometimes. People move. Some directory years may give information not listed in others.
While the residential information may be repetitive from year to year, check every one. The year you skip could contain the biggest clue of all.
5 Responses
That is also fun to see if one knows any names that they recognize.
It’s important to search manually in the directories if Ancestry or another provider has skipped a year or so for your ancestor. I have often found them by doing a manual check.
Good point. The OCR technology that is used to “read” the printed directories is not perfect and some images are not as legible as others.
I’m not sure I know how to manually check. Please explain. thanks.
Looking at them one year at a time and searching the list of directory names.