Searching City Directories, part 3: What Worked
Nov 5th, 2009 by sharbrough
Part 3 of 4
Here’s what worked
When I worked at Footnote, I used to routinely pester Peter Drinkwater about the shortcomings of the browse experience. Peter was kind enough to listen to me, and he used to tell me that they weren’t likely to do anything with browse because Search enhancements were going to replace it.
I remembered Peter’s comments while looking for my missing Frank’s, and it led me to try something else – searching. I thought, “I’ll just search LA directories for surnames starting with SH.” I figured that since FN keys the first surname on the page, that there might be some starting with “SH” that I could go to, and then browse from there – or even just page to the area where the Sharbroughs might be found.
I had a couple of problems with this approach. First, it wasn’t easy to limit the data to a specific directory – they’re all one title, right? So I decided to filter on year. That works, but the years are sorted in descending order of the number of images found for that year. It would make more sense to sort them in ascending order by year, no? I mean, you have to read the whole list, you can’t scan it.
- Example: Years for LA Directories
In this example, you can see that the years are sorted by the number of pages, not by year. Finding a specific year, like 1909, is not as simple as I could wish. However, it’s not the kind of thing that would stop an Intrepid Researcher. There’s a workaround! If you type part of a year – say, “19″ – and press ENTER, you will get a list of years that start with 19xx, in numeric order.
Once I found and filtered on 1909, I was able to look for surnames starting with SH, and choose the page beginning with “SHANKLIN.”
- First names on pages
In this example, I’m looking at images for 1909, whose “last names” start with “SH.” Notice that “Shop” meets the filter, even though the name starts with A B C. I didn’t find Frank in 1909, but in 1905 I did. There was Frank, living on S Flower St, 2 blocks from where his father Malachi B Sharbrough lived in the 1897 Directory. This method will generally take you right to the page that you’re looking for. In the 1921 directory, I assumed that “Shapiro Bros” was a classified page heading, but it wasn’t. The listing said, “Shapiro Bros (Isadore and NH) garment mfrs 546 S Los Angeles.” It was in the residential section – many commercial listings are. I should call it the “alphabetical listings” if I want to be more accurate.
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