Have you ever found yourself frustrated while searching through Ancestry.com’s city directories? As genealogists, we often assume that printed materials like city directories, with their clean, typewritten text, would be easily and accurately indexed. However, I recently discovered that unique formatting in these historical documents can lead to some surprising indexing challenges. Here’s what I learned while searching through Las Animas County, Colorado, directories, and how you can avoid similar pitfalls in your research.
Claude.ai assisted in writing this blog post.
The Search Begins
My research subject lived in Las Animas County, Colorado in 1930, and I wanted to know when he arrived and when he left. While doing locality research, I discovered that the FamilySearch catalog had images of a city directory for Trinidad, a city within the county. The images at FamilySearch were locked, meaning you can only access them at a FamilySearch center, except for the year 1921. I opened that directory and saw that the full title stated that it included not just the city of Trinidad, but all of Las Animas County and its smaller communities.
I searched online to see if the city directory was available elsewhere, and I did find PDFs of the directory through another provider. However, when viewing the PDFs online, I wasn’t able to search through them using Ctrl+F. I looked manually by last name, but since each city and community had its own alphabetized section, it was quite time consuming.
An Unexpected Discovery at Ancestry.com
The next day, it dawned on me that the directories might be included in Ancestry’s collection. I hadn’t thought of it before, because I assumed I would have seen it as a record hint already in my Ancestry Tree. Ancestry does have the Trinidad directories from 1902-1935 – not ever year, but about every other year, with some longer gaps at times. I performed a search for my ancestor’s name in the directories, narrowing the location to Las Animas County, and nothing came up. I widened the search to just the last name, and I still didn’t see his name.
A Surprising Indexing Issue
I decided to check the images myself, and found him listed his last name, then a first initial and middle initial, followed by his post office. I was surprised to see that the indexing was woefully incorrect! I had assumed that because it was a printed and somewhat easy to read image, the indexing would be better, but the indexing process mis-transcribed the middle initial and added the post office as a middle name.
The names were all indexed strangely with the name of the post office as the person’s middle name: for example, John H. Trinidad Harmon and H.H. Branson Harmison. John H. Harmon actually lived in Trinidad, and H.H. Harmison lived in Branson.
How did this happen? I think it’s because of the unusual formatting. The directory included the post office near the person’s residence after their name. In a city directory, that’s usually where the address is listed – which is probably why the indexing process got messed up. I wonder if it was machine indexed. This particular city directory included a County Taxpayers Directory as the source for the names of residents in the second half of the directory, titled “Polk’s Las Animas County Directory, 1931.” There were no addresses, just the names of the person’s post office.
I was delighted to find my research subject in the city directory. I also searched the 1929 directory and didn’t find him listed. That may be because he hadn’t moved there yet, or because that directory didn’t include the taxpayer list. There was a gap in Ancestry’s city directories from 1932-1934, and he wasn’t listed in 1935. My next step is to see if those years didn’t have any new city directories published, or if they are out there somewhere, just not part of this collection.
Tips for Searching City Directories
Here are some search tips for searching in city directories. If you have any additional tips on this topic, please share yours in the comments below.
1. Create a Locality Guide
You should make a locality guide for the places your research subjects lived. Even a simple guide can help you. Including city directories in your guide is valuable, especially for research projects taking place in the 1900s.
2. Browse the Database
At Ancestry, you can go to the home page for city directories and browse by state, then county/city. Learn which cities are the largest in your county of interest, and go to the directories for those cities. See if they also include outlying areas in the same county. This approach also allows you to see which years are available at Ancestry’s database.
3. Search Strategies
- Restrict searches to the specific county you’re looking in
- Try putting in only the first name or last name of your person
- Don’t assume the indexing will be perfect
- Sometimes lines are skipped and you’ll need to look for your person by browsing the images
4. Check Multiple Sources
- Consider FamilySearch’s catalog
- Look for digitized directories at other providers
- Check if your local library or historical society has access to different collections
- Remember that different sources might have different years available
Conclusion
This experience reminded me that even with modern technology, indexing can still present unexpected challenges. Sometimes the format of historical documents can lead to surprising indexing results, and there’s still no substitute for carefully examining the original images. What started as a frustrating search turned into a valuable lesson about thorough research methods and the importance of not relying solely on search results.
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