A record that I love to find when working on my family tree are City Directories. To me, they are one of the best records for finding information about my family. Not only do they let you know exactly where your ancestor was at a particular point in time, sometimes it’s able to provide you with a little backstory that you may not have been aware of.
In particular most of my city directory finds have been with my family living in Akron, Ohio. I am very fortunate to have many of them scanned and able to be found on the Akron-Summit County Public Library so I can look through these at my leisure in the privacy of my own home. One day I am going to spend some time finding the ones beyond 1969 that are not scanned but are available in the Special Collections area of the Main Library. But from 1859-1969 these wonderful records are available, and it helped me learn a great deal about my mom’s side of the family, both my great-great-grandmother, Mazie (Warner) Randol when she located to Akron in 1916, as well as when my mom’s father, Harold Fairhurst, and his family, moved to the Akron area (his dad came over from England in 1913 while his mom came over in 1915).
Mazie Lorenia Warner
What I like to think I discovered about Mazie was that she was an incredibly nice person. This is at least what I have come up with about my great-great-grandmother. As I saved all the city directory pages for her between 1916-1945. There were times you could see not just my great-grandmother, Mildred Laura Dunbar, moving back home with her, but Mildred’s older sister, Ina, as well.
Both times when Mildred’s marriage failed she moved back in with her mother. The same could be said for my Aunt Ina as well. To me that said a lot about Mazie. I like to think of her as this wonderful, kind-hearted woman willing to help her children in any way she could. I’ll confess that by the time I got involved in genealogy everyone who knew Mazie had passed away. But I never heard anything bad about her, so I guess there’s that.
What City Directories Can Tell You
In case you have never had the chance to come across a city directory page with your ancestor on it, let me tell you what you will find. A very small blurb but it tells you where they lived and where they worked. So if you never had an occupation down for your ancestor, this will help!
One day I hope to be able to find more city directories for my relatives in Pennsylvania. I sure hope they exist somewhere. If only I could be spoiled once again and have a library have them digitized on their website.
Helping History Come Alive 