How to use a city directory with a yearbook address

A yearbook gives an address for a teenager. A city directory, which listed the adults of a town by name with an occupation and an address, can show who else lived there and what they did. Used with care, the two together put a student into a household. This guide explains how to read a directory entry, where to find directories, and what a match does and does not prove.

What a directory entry looks like

Directories were printed most years by a commercial publisher. An entry for an adult usually runs: surname, given name, a spouse's name in brackets, an occupation, and an abbreviation for the type of residence, then the address. The commonest abbreviations are "h" for house (the person owned or headed it) and "r" or "res" for residence. "bds" or "b" is boards, meaning a lodger. Abbreviation lists differ between publishers, so read the key at the front of the volume. In some editions a repeated surname is shown by a ditto mark rather than spelled out.

A teenager may be listed too, often with "student" as the occupation, once the person reached working age.

Some directories, especially for larger towns, also have a street section that runs by street and house number. Not every edition has one, but if it does, you can read the page for the street in the yearbook and see who lived in each house.

Where to find them

• The Internet Archive holds many scanned directories, with full-text search. Public libraries scanned a lot of them, including the Cambridge Public Library's Cambridge directories.
• HathiTrust and FamilySearch (free account) have more.
• Cyndi's List: directories is a hand-built list of links.
• The town's public library: many keep an unbroken run of local directories in the local-history room, and often a librarian will look up one name for you.

Where we have matched people on this site, a person page includes a block that says what the directory lists at that address, with the directory's year and a link. We have done this for directories of Cambridge, Newton, Brookline, Quincy and Springfield, among others. Pages say what the directory lists and never "father" or "mother", since a directory does not state relationships.

Steps

1. Take the address from the yearbook entry and the year of the book.
2. Pick directories near that year. We match directories from ten years before graduation to six after it, since families often stayed at one address for years. Start with the year of graduation and move outward.
3. Search by surname and address. Search for the surname, then the street. If the directory is scanned, use the full-text search and try the surname with a first name.
4. Read the entry carefully. Note the occupation, the spouse's name, and anyone else at that address who shares the surname.
5. Compare years. The same household appearing in three directories at the same address is stronger than one entry. A move from one year to the next may explain a different address on a later record.
6. Take the household to the census (1930 or 1940) to find ages and relationships. The directory has none.

What it proves, and what it does not

• It shows that a person of that name lived at that address in that year, according to what the canvasser was told. Canvassers got people wrong and skipped some.
• It does not show relationships. Two people with the same surname at one address might be parents, an uncle, a lodger or an unrelated family sharing a house. Say "listed at the same address".
• It does not show the date a person arrived. A directory is compiled months before printing, so an entry for a given year may describe the year before.
• Street numbers changed. A house number in 1928 may not be the same building today, and a street may have been renamed. Our street map uses modern address ranges for towns with enough addresses, so treat its placement as approximate.

Common problems

• Spelling. A surname may be misspelled in either source. Try variants and look at the address.
• Same name, different person. Two families with the same name on different streets is common. The address resolves it.
• Women. A married woman usually appears only as the bracketed spouse in her husband's entry, as in "Smith John (Mary)". Search for the husband.
• OCR errors. The text layer of a scanned directory is often poor. Page through the street section by eye if the search fails.

Back to the start of the trail? See how to find a grandparent in a 1920s yearbook, and what an entry tells you.

Last checked 20 October 2026.