Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Some City Directories Online at DonsList

Have you looked for online City Directories at DonsList (http://directory.donslist.net/).

I saw a San Diego county Mailing List message from Don Krieger that noted that he had added directories for:

*  San Diego: 1887-1925
*  San Francisco: 1880, 1887, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1981, 1935 by Phone
*  Oakland/Alameda/Berkeley: 1869-1915, 1938 by Address

The message says:

"For the San Diego and Oakland directories, I put more than one into single volumes.  That makes them easier to search.  In addition you can use the  "SEARCH SELECTOR" pull down menu near the top of the left frame to search groups of volumes, e.g. all the San Diego books at once.  I've separated the San Francisco group search into decades because there are too many books to search at once."

The DonsList page has 2,979 titles totalling 2,524,521 pages as of December 2010.
The DonsList site Directory page looks like this:


I clicked on "CA" for California and saw this list:


I was interested in San Diego City Ddirectories, so I clicked on the 1919-1920 link:


The first page of the directory appears in the lower frame above.  There is a small search box in the upper left of the top frame.  I put "Carringer" in the search box and saw:


The search results are in the right-hand part of the upper frame.  There was an interesting entry there -

"0239 SanDiegoCA1919 cigar mkr Carringer Emily Mrs" 

This means on page 0239of the 1919 directory that there is a listing for Mrs. Emily Carringer a cigar maker.  Huh?  I didn't know that!  I clicked on page 0239:


The top of the page quickly appeared.  At the top of the large lower frame is the "NEXT" and "PREVIOUS" links so the user can advance page-by-page if desired.  I scrolled down to see the Carringer listings:


The entry I noted above says:

"Carringer Emily Mrs, with the Marston Company, r 2100, 1st"

What happened to the cigar maker?  It was for the previous entry - Julian Carrilly.  Oh well!

The DonsList website works extremely well - the name search works with links to specific pages, the site works very quickly, and the site is FREE!

I wish that some subscription services with City Directories worked this efficiently and fast!

2 comments:

Darlene said...

Whoooooooo Hooooooooo. Randy is da man!

Couple of those Pittsburgh CDs might fill in some blanks for me.

Thank you for sharing.

Lidian said...

Thank you so much! I had no idea about Donslist - it looks terrific, and I can't wait to check out those NYC directories :)