U.S. City Directories

The consolidated records in this collection often tell a wider story about a person: They allow a researcher to learn when a person married or divorced, and in some cases deduce when the head of the household or their spouse died. They also help track changes in workplace or occupation and reveal when a person moved from one location to another.

City directories, like census records, contain information that helps genealogists establish residences, occupations, and relationships between individuals. The added benefit of city directories is that they were published annually in many cities and towns throughout the United States.

MyHeritage corrected errors in the original Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scans of the directory pages, and then employed several advanced technologies, including Record Extraction, Name Entity Recognition, and Conditional Random Fields to parse the data, and correct errors in the original OCR output of the directory pages. Training a machine learning model how to parse raw free-text records into names, occupations, and addresses enabled the production of a structured, searchable index of valuable historical information. Optical Character Recognition may introduce mistakes in some records, and the use of machine learning to parse these records may create mistakes as well. Therefore, as with any genealogical record, users are encouraged to consult the original images and fix any mistakes they may find when extracting information into their family trees.

The records in this collection date back to the 1800s and are an excellent resource for creating a more informed picture of family life during the intervening years between censuses. Of particular note is the strength of city directories in filling in the genealogical gap caused by the destruction of almost all of the 1890 U.S. Federal Census schedules. The 20-year period between the 1880 Census and the 1900 Census has long been a challenge in family history research, and city directories on MyHeritage from this period serve as an important census substitute.

City directories were first published in the U.S. in 1785, with directories from Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Baltimore being published before the end of the 18th century. The popularity of these directories increased tremendously in the 19th century and reached their zenith during the latter part of the 20th century.

Publishers of these directories employed local residents to canvas these cities and towns regularly to collect and update the data they included in their publications. The information collected varies somewhat by year and publisher as practices evolved. For example, by the start of the 20th century, it was common to find the names of deceased spouses listed. Some publishers even collected and published the names of recently deceased residents with their age at death and full death date. City directories were most commonly published under the name of a primary city but often contain the same information for nearby smaller cities and towns.

This collection will be updated soon to include pre-1860 directories as well as a large and unique set of directories published after 1960.