Thursday, March 22, 2012

Finding Addresses of People in the 1940 U.S. Census Using City Directories

After writing Where Were My Peeps in 1940? yesterday, I went hunting for the addresses of my father's family and his sibling's families in the City Directories collection on Ancestry.com.   Ancestry.com has a wealth of small and large city directories from the 1940 time period in their U.S. City Directories collection.

Fortunately for me, Ancestry.com has City Directories from 1880 to 1963 for Leominster, Massachusetts, where my Seaver family resided.  A search for [fred* w seaver] in the search box in 1940 in Leominster did not find him.  Deleting the 1940, the search found 43 matches in Leominster, but not for 1940.  Plan B was to browse the 1940 City Directory for Leominster for my Seaver families.  Here is the database search field and the browse entries:


Note that there are dropdown boxes in the "Browse this collection" area (on the right) for State, City or county, and Year.  Once the boxes are filled in, a link to the available city directories is provided.  I clicked on the link.

The link took me to the first image of the selected directory.  I noted that there were 432 images in this directory, so I put 300 in the image number box, and quickly found the Seaver listings on Image 320:


Aha.  Frederick W. Seaver, his wife A. Bessie, his son Edward R., his son Frederick W. Jr, and his daughter Geraldine all resided at 90 Main Street in Leominster. As a result of this, I went back this morning and edited my earlier post to find the ED of 90 Main Street in 1940 (it was ED 14-181).  

Now I want to find the EDs for the three married daughters of Fred and Bessie Seaver.

1)  Marion Braithwaite - the 1940 Leominster City Directory said that she lived with her husband Irving Braithwaite at 16 Walnut Court in Leominster.  Using the Steve Morse ED Finder, that is in ED 14-181.

2)  Ruth Fischer - the 1940 Leominster City Directory said that she lived with her husband Bowers A Fischer at 918 Main Street in North Leominster.  The cross and back streets are, from the current Google Map, Keystone, Eastern and Industrial.  These streets are not in the Steve Morse ED Finder.  I went to the NARA 1940 ED Map website (http://www.archives.gov/research/search/) and by comparing the streets on that map with the current Google Map, I was able to determine that the ED was 14-160, as shown below (918 Main Street is near the intersection of Lincoln and Main):


3)  Evelyn Wood - the 1940 Leominster City directory did not list her or her husband, Walter H. Wood.  I checked the Lawrence, Massachusetts City Directory and there was a listing for Walter H. Wood.  It said he worked in Lawrence, but resided in Salem, New Hampshire.  There is no 1940 City Directory available for Salem, N.H.  The Steve Morse ED Finder was used to find the small town or rural ED numbers for Salem - it is either 8-69 (north of route 28) or 8-70 (south of Route 28).  The ED description for ED 8-69 is:

"SALEM TOWN N OF A LINE BEGINNING WHERE STATE ROAD 28 CROSSES WESTERN TOWN LINE, THEN SOUTHERLY ALONG CENTER OF STATE ROAD 28 TO BROADWAY IN SALEM DEPOT, THEN ALONG CENTER OF BROADWAY TO STATE ROAD 28, AND THEN ALONG CENTER OF STATE ROAD 28 TO SOUTHERN TOWN LINE; CANOBIE LAKE (PART), HAMPSHIRE ROAD (PART), NORTH SALEM, SALEM, SALEM DEPOT (PART)"

I know that they lived on Main Street just east of Broadway, so I think that it should be ED 8-69.

Lastly, I was curious as to why the search for Fred* W. Seaver in the 1940 Leominster City Directory did not find him.  The reason was, apparently, he was not the first Seaver listed on the page.  A search for Edward Seaver with Lived In = Leominster found him in the 1940 City Directory.  A search for just Seaver and Lived In = Leominster and Year = 1940 found the same listing.  Apparently, Ancestry.com did not index every person in the City directories, only the first name in a surname listing.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/03/finding-addresses-of-people-in-1940-us.html

copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Laryn Brown said...

Randy, I'd be curious of what you find doing the same searches on the new U.S. City Directories (Beta) database.

http://search.ancestry.com/search/DB.aspx?dbid=2469

This version of the city directories collection extracts the names from the OCR and makes them more findable.

-Laryn Brown

Geolover said...

Randy you said "Lastly, I was curious as to why the search for Fred* W. Seaver in the 1940 Leominster City Directory did not find him. The reason was, apparently, he was not the first Seaver listed on the page. A search for Edward Seaver with Lived In = Leominster found him in the 1940 City Directory. A search for just Seaver and Lived In = Leominster and Year = 1940 found the same listing. Apparently, Ancestry.com did not index every person in the City directories, only the first name in a surname listing."

These OCR indexes - for both miscellaneous City Directory collections and the sometimes better-indexed ones in the (Beta) group - often miss names, or index the beginning of each line of a multiple-line listing as a 'person'. There was no concerted attempt to not index any but the first of a surname, but in Directories where there is a quotation character (") to indicate 'ditto' below the first listing for a surname, the OCR system did not pick up the surname.

There are also many directories that are not indexed at all - it is always useful to check the Card Catalog to try to locate these.