The Unofficial Footnote Blog

Many people are not familiar with City Directories. I tell them that it’s like a phone book, before there were phone numbers in them. That’s too simple, and I’d like to describe them a bit more now.

I’m very fond of a book that contains an entry like, “Brown, Sarah widow of Samuel.” You can generally find a person, their occupation, and their place of residence in these directories. But sometimes, as in the case above, you find a relationship. I always thought it would be interesting to take all of the employees with the same employer and map their residences and workplace and imagine their daily trip to and from work. Perhaps I’d want to know which bars are on the way.

Many directories are a sort of combined white pages and yellow pages - they have a residential and a business section. The business section is often “classified” - Barbers, Brewers, Cigar Makers, and so on. Back when I was an undergraduate philosophy major, I wondered about this system of classification. Who determined what classifications would be used, an how? When I got older, I found that the publisher would sell a listing in any (or as many) classifications as a business liked. Perhaps it was always that way, but certainly the classification itself is not to be confused with Linnaen Taxonomy.

Some also possess a Street and Avenue section, which shows the names of the residents or businesses in a given block.

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This is the unofficial Footnote Blog. There is also an official Footnote Blog. On 30-March, when Footnote rolled the 1930 Census, they also announced enhancements to the search function on the site. The announcement said, in part:

Search Updates
We’ve received some great feedback about searching Footnote and we’ve made some significant improvements based on your suggestions.  The new search results page makes it easier to narrow or broaden, refine and change your search.  Now you can select the kinds of results you want and remove or add matches found though OCR (Optical Character Recognition–the computer read text of newspapers, city directories and other typed documents).  You’ll also find an improved quicklook and an option to add an image to a Footnote Page right from the search results.  This intro video provides more details about the new search.

Let’s review these changes.

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This past week, Footnote announced a “Great Depression Collection.” The content was identified as the Population Schedules from the 1930 US Federal Census, and historical newspapers from the period. The newspapers have been on the site for some time previously, but that’s a common marketing approach to which Footnote is not immune. Re-branding and re-launching web content is a doctrine for web marketers who have taken the PT Barnum course. It seems to me that the Great Depression Collection is not a collection, in the broad sense of the term, but a 1930 Census, wrapped in old newspapers.

There is a bit of a hint that the Great Depression Collection is intended to illuminate our current economic landscape. Researching historical records about the previous hard landing for the economy might involve understanding the causes of the last one, and I’m not sure that the census explains that very well. The newspapers of the time are full of explanations, many of which history has shown to be less causative than originally hoped. There are five “major city” newspapers at Footnote, but none of them include years later than 1923. For the year 1930, there are 22 Small Town Papers on the site. The term “depression” can be found in 21 of them, but not every occurrence refers to the economy. There’s precious little of probative value in a discussion of economics to be found in this collection. But that’s not a bad thing, it’s just an indication that the labels have a bit of salesmanship involved in their selection.

It further seems to me that the 1930 Census is more properly viewed as a great enhancement to Footnote’s already considerable World War II collection. A bit of arithmetic will tell you that anyone serving in the military when WWII ended in 1945 should have been at least 17 years old, indicating a birth no later than 1928. And in fact, you can generally find everyone who served in WWII in the 1930 Census. When you do, you find them in the context of a family - either as parents or children. In a sense, you find what they were fighting for, in the war.

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Newspapers, we used to say, have something for everybody. There are news stories about the events of the day, local news, births, marriages, and deaths. Even the ads are interesting. Genealogists can see ads for the places where their families worked. Historians can gather useful pricing, product, and advertising information.

The papers at Footnote fall into two categories: Small Town Papers, and Historical Papers.

Small Town Papers is the publisher of digital versions of many small town papers. They’re of great value to historians and genealogists because of their contemporary nature (they write them about current events - “news”), their local nature (they identify the people in the place) and the sheer scope of it all (there are so many of them, covering centuries). Footnote has about 300 different small town papers from this source.

Historical Newspapers from large cities provide context for the major events of the day. For instance, the San Francisco paper from the time of the Earthquake, the Chicago paper from the time of the Great Fire, and Washington, Atlanta, and London papers from war times.

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Free lectures for your genealogy society.

You read that right. For a limited time, in an effort to debug the technique, Beau Sharbrough will speak to your genealogy society (or your genealogical society, if you prefer), for free.

There is a condition. I don’t intend to actually attend the meeting.

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