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Friday, September 25, 2009

San Francisco and Los Angeles City Directories on Footnote.com - Post 1

I was browsing through the www.Footnote.com record data collections and noticed that they have City Directories for:

* Los Angeles, 1873 to 1924

* San Francisco, 1861 to 1923

What a wonderful collection to find... now I have many more resources to look through and don't have to go to the libraries in Los Angeles and San Francisco to search these years. Of course, if I needed information after 1923, I would need to go to the libraries.

A description of the City Directories at Footnote.com is posted at http://www.footnote.com/page/122_city_directories/. This page notes:

"City directories at Footnote are organized as follows:

"* alphabetically by state,
* then alphabetically by city or town name,
* then alphabetically by last name, with only the name listed at the top of each page showing in the browse menu.

"If you are looking for a particular name, use the search mode. But failing that, browse to the state and town in which you're looking for someone. Then browse through the list of names printed at the top of each page until you find the correct page to review. It's a little like flipping through a phone book, glancing only at the names in the top corner until you get to the section of the alphabet you're looking for."

There are several ways to search these directories efficiently - and I will document those ways in future posts.

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