City Directories – more than a phone book
Apr 20th, 2009 by sharbrough
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.
