City Directories Track A Town Year By Year

The shelf I want sits on the second floor of a research library, and it holds a run of city directories for one town, one volume to a year. I pulled the 1873 book first because I had a man I could not place, and by the time I worked forward to 1881 I had him at four addresses and in three trades. The name on the spine of my book about the fifteenth governor of Texas is Rosser Newton, and a shelf like that one is where most of the ordinary life in it came from.

Nothing on that shelf was written for me. A directory was a commercial product, sold by subscription, put together by a canvasser who walked a route and wrote down what the person who answered the door was willing to tell him. That is the whole apparatus, and it is why the books are so useful.

What A City Directory Records That A Census Misses

The federal count comes once every ten years. It is a fine instrument for the decade and a poor one for the year, because everything a household does between two visits has to be inferred from the difference between them.

A man who moved five times, changed trades twice, took a partner, dissolved the partnership, and moved his shop across the square shows up in the federal population schedules held by the National Archives as one line in 1870 and a slightly different line in 1880. The directories carry all of it, year by year, in the order it happened. The census gives you a photograph of a decade and the directory run gives you the decade itself.

The detail is mundane, which is the point. An address, an occupation, a note that a man boards rather than keeps house, the firm name and the two partners printed under it, the street corner where the shop stood. None of that was recorded to settle any argument, which is exactly what makes it hard to argue with.

A census tells me the town was there. A run of directories tells me the town moved.

The claim below is one I would defend at a table with people who know this material better than I do. If I could keep only one class of record for reconstructing an ordinary life in a Texas town in the second half of the nineteenth century, I would keep the directories and give up the census schedules. The census is the more respectable source and the directory is the more informative one, and I think a fair number of researchers have that ranking backward out of habit.

How To Read A Run Of Directories Year By Year

The method is simple and slow. Take one name and one town, start at the earliest volume that survives, and write down the entry from every year in sequence with nothing left out, including the years when the entry does not change.

What you are building is a chronology rather than a fact. A single entry tells you almost nothing. Nine entries in a row tell you when a man stopped being a clerk and started being a partner, and whether the change of address came before the change of trade or after it.

The sequence is where the judgment lives. A move to a better street the year after a partnership forms reads one way. The same move two years before the partnership dissolves reads another, and the directory itself offers no opinion about either, which is a considerable advantage over a source that does.

Then read the front matter, which almost everybody skips. The publisher usually explains how the canvass was conducted, what territory it covered, what he charged for a listing, and which classes of people he did or did not include, and those pages decide how much weight the entries can carry. A directory that tells you it canvassed only inside the city limits has just told you that a family four miles out was never going to appear no matter how prosperous it was.

The habit is not confined to the archive. On the operating side of my work I read equipment records the same way, in sequence rather than in a snapshot, which is what I was getting at when I wrote here about the maintenance a yard defers and no covenant ever tests. A run of ordinary annual records beats a single well prepared summary in both jobs, and for the same reason.

Where The Directory Method Breaks Down

Absence from a directory proves very little, and this is the part I have to keep saying out loud to myself. A canvasser found the people he found. A publisher listed the people he thought worth listing and the people who paid.

Renters moved between the canvass and the printing. Households where nobody was home got skipped. Working people, and in that period whole categories of people the publisher did not consider part of the commercial town, appear inconsistently or not at all, and a run of volumes will quietly tell you that a man vanished in 1877 when he had done nothing more than move to the far side of a county line.

So the negative inference is the trap. Presence is evidence and absence is a question, and I have watched myself start to build a paragraph on a gap before catching what I was doing.

There is a second limit worth naming. Directories exist for towns of a certain size and for years when a publisher believed he could sell the book, so the method is strongest for the places that already attract attention and weakest for the rural county where the records are thinnest. The history the Census Bureau keeps of its own count at least covers everyone by design, which is a real answer to the argument I made three paragraphs ago, and any honest version of my position has to carry it.

Digitization changed the economics of all of this and changed none of the method. Volumes that once meant a trip and a week of my time now open on a screen in an afternoon, and that access is the reason the ordinary life in my Coke research got built at all. It did not make a single one of these books more reliable than the canvasser who wrote it.

When people ask what the research behind Richard Coke: Texan actually involved, they expect the answer to be letters, and letters are the part that reads best on a page. The truer answer is that the spine of the chronology came out of records nobody wrote for posterity. I signed that book Rosser Newton, and the part of it I would defend hardest is not a conclusion but a method.

A letter tells you what a man wanted said. A directory tells you where he was standing when he said it.