It’s not a secret. I’m a big fan of City Directories. Footnote has a lot of them. But it’s not always as easy to find what you’re looking for as one might wish. I’ve spent some time fooling with this, and I have some suggestions for you.

I have a very distant cousin named Frank F Sharbrough. His great-grandfather, Malachi Sharbrough, was my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. That’s not important. What’s important was that I knew a bit about the structure of Frank Frazier Sharbrough’s family tree, and wanted to see how the LA city directories could improve my understanding of his life.

Frank lived from 1884 to 1968. His father, Malachi Bridger Sharbrough, was a prominent Methodist minister in California. I’ve found him listed in newspapers a number of time, generally listing appointments within the Methodist church.

Looking for Sharbroughs in the LA city directories gets hits on both Malachi Bridger and his son Frank.

The Sharbrough hits on the LA City Directories told this story:

frank1

Frank was first listed in 1906, when he was 22. Over the next 20 years, he was a clerk, then a driver, then a plumber. He moved a lot until the end of the Great War, and was pretty stable after that. I liked having this information, but I couldn’t help noticing that there were some gaps in the years. Also, in 1922, his son Francis E would seem to have been listed at his address, but Francis E was only 12, so I’m thinking it’s just a mistake, and that the record refers to Frank F.

So I decided to look for some more records. Before I explain those results, I need to define two terms.

“OCR” stands for “Optical Character Recognition.” That’s one of the methods that Footnote uses to process the images in city directories. Footnote produces pretty good OCR results, but “pretty good” can still be pretty bad if the original image is made from film that is blurry, scratched, too dark or light, and so on.

The words that OCR produces are treated as “keywords” by Footnote. There is an important difference between “keywords” and “keyed fields” such as names, publication dates, place names, and the like. The important difference is how they behave in Search at Footnote. When processing City Directories, Footnote staff and contractors keyed the first surname found on each page. Those names are searchable as LAST NAME. The rest of the names on the page are in a “text blob” that’s just a long list of words. These words can only be found by using a “keyword” search.

“Fan” is a term used to describe an aspect of Browse. When browsing at Footnote, each list is limited to 12 items. In the case of city directories, once you choose the 1907 directory, you see the first 12 pages.

I suspected that the missing years contained listings for Frank that weren’t found because the OCR produced alternative spellings. All I needed to do was to find the pages that had Sharbroughs in the other years and I could prove or disprove my hypothesis – and hopefully fill in the story.