RLP 338: When City Directory Indexing Goes Wrong

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 338 When City Directory Indexing Goes Wrong. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (49s):
I’m great. I’ve been watching lectures from the APG Conference, Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference, and that’s been really interesting. And then I’ve been watching lectures from the Texas Family History Conference put on by the Texas State Genealogical Society, and it’s been nice to see a lot of AI integrated into the lectures. And I enjoyed Andrew Redfern lecture at Texas’ Conference about writing biographies of our ancestors using AI. And it’s always great to hear how other people are using the tools to get more ideas. So I’ve enjoyed that.

Diana (1m 28s):
Oh, I agree. And I really enjoyed Andrew’s lecture as well. Well, I am working on wrapping up my Weatherford project. At the end of a project I always like to go into my family tree, and that is when I do all the updates and I have some new documents, I found two new deeds and I have a new hypothesis that both sets of parents that I have attached. Yes, I had attached two sets of parents that neither one of them are right and I need to put in my new hypothesis or just maybe not have a set of parents attached at this moment until I can further my hypothesis. So anyway, I’m going to go update my online trees both on Ancestry and FamilySearch.

Diana (2m 10s):
And that’s always really a fun part of finishing up a project, getting everything correct out there.

Nicole (2m 16s):
It is. Yeah. Hopefully you’ll just unlink the parents and not delete them all because who knows, maybe they’re cousins.

Diana (2m 23s):
Right? I won’t delete them because I have done a lot of research on the families, So

Nicole (2m 27s):
It’s helpful.

Diana (2m 27s):
I’ll leave them out there.

Nicole (2m 29s):
Yeah, great. It’s helpful to have them to, to separate, you know, records out and to know who they belong to.

Diana (2m 35s):
It really is. And I found some additional records for them that maybe I will add to the tree so that other people can see those in there in case they’re researching. So, and I will also put my report, I always like to have my research reports out there, so way can one can see my methodology and my thinking.

Nicole (2m 55s):
Oh, good. Well, coming up in the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series is Susan McKee. She’s talking about Using Irish Naming Convention to Discover the Family of Thomas Delaney in the in the 1800s in Ireland. Hopefully you’ll join us for that on January 18th at 11:00 AM that’s a Saturday. And if you haven’t registered yet, please join us for the 2025 webinar series and the topics included there will be Ireland, Queens County, Irish naming Convention, Catholic Parish registers, civil registration, and the 1901 census. Also coming up is the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group, and that begins February, 2025.

Nicole (3m 35s):
So be sure to register for that if you are interested in joining us and learning from each other in your peer group. And also by following the assignments. I always learn so much by applying these principles to my own research. And it will be exciting in February because there is the new DNA GEDCom client that’s available number four. So hopefully everyone can, you know, download their matches that they want to and make network graphs as needed. And hopefully we can start integrating some AI into that study group as well and learning how AI can help us with our DNA and where, where there’s so much data, I feel like there’s a big opportunity for AI to be helpful with, with that work.

Nicole (4m 17s):
So that’s something that I’m really looking forward to and hopefully you’ll join us. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader, please let us know. Email us or apply on our website. Send us an example of your DNA research reports and then be sure you’re joining our newsletter to get updates each Monday and coupon codes. And then we will hopefully see you all at the upcoming RootsTech Conference on March 6th through 8th and the NGS Family History Conference on May 23rd through 26th in Louisville. Alright, have you ever found yourself frustrated while searching through Ancestry City Directories? That’s the topic we have today for this episode, and we’re going to be talking kind of about some of these issues with indexing and OCR indexing and how sometimes we need to do a better job of searching through these.

Nicole (5m 11s):
So as Genealogists, I think we often assume that printed materials like City Directories will be easy to index accurately because they have clean typewritten text and it’s so much easier to decipher than handwritten texts. But I recently discovered that unique formatting in some of these historical documents can lead to some surprising indexing challenges. So I’m gonna talk about some things I learned while searching through the Los Animas County, Colorado City Directories, and hopefully give you some ideas so you can avoid similar pitfalls in your research.

Diana (5m 49s):
This will be such a good episode because I’m sure all of our listeners have had that experience of putting in your search term and then you don’t get any hits. And we need to be smarter than the program in figuring out how to do smart searches, how to actually go into the records and find what we need. And that’s something that just comes from experience and getting some new ideas. This will be great. Well, Nicole, what even prompted this whole idea of searching the City Directories? What project were you working on?

Nicole (6m 20s):
I was working on a research project for certification, and my research subject lived in Los Animas County Colorado in 1930. And I wanted to know when he arrived and when he’d left. And while doing locality research, I discovered that the FamilySearch catalog had images of a city directory for Trinidad, which is a city within that county. And this isn’t the same city where my ancestor lived, but I was hoping that maybe it included some of those outliers with, you know, in a county because the title of it included the Los Animas County and not just Trinidad. Well, the images at FamilySearch were locked, meaning that you can only access them at a FamilySearch center except for the year in 1921.

Nicole (7m 6s):
So I could open the microfilm that had been digitized for that year online, and I opened it that directory and saw that the full title stated that it included not just the city of Trinidad, but all of Los Animas County and its smaller communities. So that was really exciting.

Diana (7m 24s):
Oh, that is so great. I think so often we think of City Directories only for big cities, and so I’ve been in Los Animas County and it’s a lot of farm country and even a county seats pretty small, so that’s really neat that it would have all the smaller little areas included.

Nicole (7m 43s):
Yeah, that was really neat. And I think it’s rare, I don’t think all City Directories do that, but it’s always worth a try to check that.

Diana (7m 50s):
Oh my goodness. Yes. So what challenges did you face when you tried to access these other years? Because of course when you have a city directory and they’re done every single year, you want to get the whole run of them, not just one. So how did you try to get those online?

Nicole (8m 7s):
Well, first I thought I just need to go to the FamilySearch Center in Tucson, but then I thought, well, maybe they’re online somewhere else. So I searched online to see if any City Directories were available online somewhere else at a different image provider. And I did find PDFs of the directory somewhere else. I can’t even remember, it was like a random website, but looking at the PDFs online, it wasn’t letting me search them using Control F. So I looked manually by last name. But they restarted the alphabetizing with each city and each small community within Los Animas County. So it was quite time consuming.

Diana (8m 47s):
Yeah, that would not be the most fun thing to do, especially if there were a lot of small communities. Then you had an exciting discovery. What was that?

Nicole (8m 58s):
Oh, well, obviously City Directories are in a collection at Ancestry, so I thought, well, maybe they’re in Ancestry’s collection. It didn’t really dawn on me until that moment because I just figured that if my ancestor was in the city directory collection, then it would’ve already appeared as a hint in my tree. That was surprising that it didn’t appear as a hint. And I did look in Ancestry City Directory collection, and they did have it. They had all the Trinidad directories from 1902 to 1935, and I have to take back the word all because they didn’t have every year, but it was about every other year. Sometimes it was every other year, but sometimes it was longer gaps.

Nicole (9m 39s):
So I went ahead and performed a search for my ancestors’ name in the directories, and I put the location as Los Animas County and nothing came up. And that was weird. So I widened the search to just the last name to Los Animas County, and I still didn’t see his name in the results, so that was disappointing. But I wondered if you know something’s wrong. ’cause I did know they lived there in 1930 because that’s where they lived in the 1930 census.

Diana (10m 10s):
Oh my goodness. Isn’t that so interesting? And it makes you wonder, I’m sure the indexing was machine indexing. And as we’ve been talking about AI, this is another form of artificial intelligence that these companies use for indexing. So of course there could be things missed or not completely accurate. So what did you find when you went into the actual images yourself? Because that’s the next thing we do, right after we don’t have anything pull up in the search bar, then we just go look ourselves.

Nicole (10m 46s):
Right. And that’s what I had been doing, you know, and had anticipated doing at the FamilySearch Center, you know, because they had the images there too. I just thought I would go look through and look myself as if I was paging through the book. But sometimes when we’re searching a database, we don’t always think to go look at the images and just browse the pages at Ancestry. So I decided to do that. And I did find my ancestor right there listed by his last name in in the section I would’ve expected. And then it had his first initial and then his middle initial followed by his post office. And that was interesting that it had the post office.

Nicole (11m 27s):
I was surprised to see that the indexing didn’t pick this up. And I was wondering, you know, why didn’t I see this in my search results? And I had just assumed that because this was a printed city directory and somewhat easy to read that the indexing would be accurate. But I realized that the indexing process had mistranscribed the middle initial and added the post office as a middle name. So it had all kinds of weird stuff. So I didn’t notice it because it had this extra name of the post office as part of the person’s name.

Diana (11m 60s):
Oh, that is so funny. Interesting. So did you notice that happened with a lot of the names?

Nicole (12m 7s):
Yeah. So here are some of the other examples. The names were all indexed strangely with the name of the post office as the person’s middle name. So when I opened the bottom of Ancestry where it has all the indexed names from that page, I could see clearly that it had done it like this. But it basically had like for a man named John H. Harmon, instead of putting John H. Harmon, it put John h Trinidad Harmon. And for HH Harmon, it had hh Branson, Harmon, and Branson and Trinidad are names of the post offices. So John H. Harmon lived in Trinidad and HH Harmon lived in Branson.

Nicole (12m 49s):
And so, you know, you might see these results in search results and and be like, that doesn’t sound quite right. But for my case, it was extra difficult because it was only initials and one of the initials was wrong. So it really didn’t look like a match at all. And So I didn’t even click on it. So I guess there’s two lessons here. Like you can just browse the image or you can click on anything with the right surname and check it to see what it actually says.

Diana (13m 16s):
That’s so interesting. You wrote a blog post about this and looking at the image, I can see that it basically messed up the indexing for every person on there. They’d always wanted to add the post office to part of their name.

Nicole (13m 29s):
Yeah, and it’s really silly, you know, a human doing that would’ve known, at least I hope. But if it was a computer, I think it’s more, it’s excusable. The other thing about it, it is possibly why it’s unique and different is that it was actually taken from a list of taxpayers in a county, and that’s why it has their post office name instead of like their address. And typically in a city directory, you’ll see a like a street address for that city, but this was like a separate ha, like another half of the city directory that has a list of all the, all the taxpayers in the whole county.

Diana (14m 6s):
Interesting. So this is another lesson to when you look at a collection like this, really go into the source. And I always like to say, look at the very beginning, look at the end, kind of scroll through it, get a feeling for what this is all about. And City Directories, that’s something really important to do because it can have several sections just like you discovered here. So, wow, that’s great. Well, let’s have a word from our sponsor. Imagine curling up in a cozy chair, scrolling through Newspapers.com and discovering a family members smiling back at you in a photo you’ve never seen before. Give the genealogy lover in your life a gift subscription to Newspapers.com and make this a reality.

Diana (14m 46s):
They’ll break through genealogy brick walls with access to hundreds of years of wedding announcements, obituaries, family stories, and so much more. There’s always something new to discover on Newspapers.com with a growing archive of over 1 billion pages from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Long after other gifts are forgotten, A Newspapers.com gift subscription, we’ll continue to delight, make the past the best present ever. For listeners of today’s show, Newspapers.com is offering 20% off gift subscriptions for a limited time, Just use the code Family Locket at checkout. Well, what did you end up finding out about your research subject in the end?

Nicole (15m 27s):
Well, I was just so delighted to find him listed in the city directory because it gave some more details about his life, and I was hoping to see when he arrived there and when he left. So I also searched the 1929 directory and found that he wasn’t listed, and it could be that he hadn’t moved there yet, or because that directory didn’t actually include that taxpayer list. So it kind of gives me some research I need to do next, which is to go get the tax records. And there was a gap in Ancestry City Directories from 1932 to 34. I don’t know if there were City Directories published those years, but he wasn’t listed in 1935.

Nicole (16m 7s):
So another one of my next steps is to go and see if those years had City Directories published, and if I can get them somewhere else in a different collection.

Diana (16m 15s):
Oh, that’s great. So of course when you find one record, it always leads you to more records and more research, doesn’t it? Right. Well, let’s give some tips for searching City Directories effectively. And some of our listeners may not have really used City Directories much, but they can be absolutely wonderful. So our first tip is to create a locality guide. And this is part of the Research Like a Pro process. So you need to make a locality guide for the places your research subjects lived, even something simple can help you. And so always look for City Directories, especially for research projects taking place in the 1900s.

Nicole (16m 58s):
That’s why I thought to look in the city directory and really dig into it instead of just assuming I would’ve gotten a hit is because I was doing locality research. All right. The next tip is to browse the database. So at Ancestry you can go to the homepage for City Directories, so the collection page, and then on the side, the right sidebar, it allows you to browse by state and then browse by county or city, usually city. So one thing to do is to learn which cities are the largest in your county of interest and go to the directories for those cities. Then see if they also include outlying areas in the same county, just in case.

Nicole (17m 38s):
And this approach also allows you to see which years are available at Ancestry’s database, because after you browse to the state and the city, then the next dropdown box will be years. And then you can quickly see, okay, it has, you know, every other year, or it has every year from 1910 to 1940 or whatever it is.

Diana (17m 56s):
Yeah, the browsing is really helpful just to see exactly what’s available. And you know, if you do find that maybe it’s not available, I would put that in the in my locality guide as well. The years that are available, or just a note that, nope, there are no City Directories for this area. So you know, you’ve looked and you’ve figured that out. Well then you wanna have some really good search strategies, and this would be to restrict your searches to the specific county you’re looking in, and then try putting in only the first name or the last name of your person. And as we’ve talked about, don’t assume the indexing will be perfect. Also, sometimes lines are skipped and you’ll need to look for your person by browsing the images.

Diana (18m 39s):
So one of the reports that I have been reviewing for our recent study group had an example of a city directory where the indexing was off one line all the way through. No, actually it was that the printing was off one line all the way through. Things were just not quite lined up correctly in the actual image. So really interesting things can happen with the city directory. So you’ll discover that if you really do a study of the page.

Nicole (19m 5s):
Right. I think that’s so important to do that. The next tip is to check multiple sources. So consider FamilySearch’s catalog, look for digitized directories at other image providers and check if your local library or historical society has access to different collections. So remember that different sources might have different years available and you might not find everything just in one place.

Diana (19m 28s):
Right. Well, after you wrote this blog, you had some great comments and someone shared another tip. “In addition to indexing errors, I have come across many catalog errors in the US City Directories collection. For an example, it appears that the collection includes all published St. Paul Minnesota directories from 1932 to 1960. When I started looking at scanned images to figure out why my grandmother wasn’t showing up, it was usually because only part of the directory was scanned for a year, or the directory scanned was suburban directory, not the city directory.” So thanks Donna for that comment. That is so interesting,

Nicole (20m 7s):
Right? It’s challenging to recognize that some parts of a source might be missing when they’re just included in part of this big collection. So we really have to do a source analysis to fully understand what there is. And it sounds like Donna really did a good job with that.

Diana (20m 22s):
Yes.

Nicole (20m 23s):
Another comment that we received on the blog post says, “because my father and grandfather were born in Trinidad, I have several City Directories all downloaded from the internet archive. However, I would not have found your example of John Harmon in 1931 because whoever digitized the 1931 directory managed to cut off the last line of page 348. All the other people in the image are there, but the last line is mostly missing. So that’s another thing to be aware of is just imaging errors.” So thanks Marshall for that comment.

Diana (20m 54s):
That is a great comment. Something we have to be so aware of. Well, after talking about City Directories and your work with this, what is your key takeaway in this record type?

Nicole (21m 6s):
Well, it reminded me that even with modern technology indexing can still be wrong and can present challenges. So sometimes the format of the historical documents can lead to surprising indexing, and there’s still no substitute for just carefully examining the original images. And what started as a frustrating search turned into a valuable lesson and a delightful discovery. And the lesson was about thorough research methods and the importance of not relying solely on searching the database. So we just have to sometimes look with our own eyes if the OCR is not catching it.

Diana (21m 44s):
Absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion on City Directories and hopefully it will give you some tips on looking for City Directories, but also taking a second look at some of the sources that could be problematic. You know, some things that you’re not finding, maybe there’s a reason why you’re not finding them. So we wish you the best in all your research and we will talk to you later. Bye-bye

Nicole (22m 10s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.