Strategies to Jumpstart Your Research

by Juliana Szucs

Every year at this time, I feel the tug of family history. After the holidays, genealogists invariably feel a renewed burst of interest in their family history research.  Even with 45+ years of researching with my mom, I’m once again confronting our toughest research challenges. Some of you may be in a similar situation, so this week, as I try to jumpstart my own research, I thought I’d share a few strategies with you.  

Write It Up 

I’ve been writing about family history for more than twenty-five years, and I can tell you one thing: nothing opens your eyes like writing about your research. I will not embarrass myself by telling you how many times this practice has shot a big old hole in a working research theory. Yet, just as often, it has opened new doors. 

Use a notebook or your computer as a sounding board as you try to sort out what is holding you back. As ideas develop, try not to abandon the exercise completely. Instead, make notes as you think of things. Write all your thoughts—wild and not-so-wild—and then, when you’re done, set out to prove or disprove any theories you came up with while writing. You may discover that the real problem isn’t a lack of records, but an assumption you’ve been carrying unchallenged for years. 

Study the History 

I know I say this all the time, but it’s tried and true: learn the history of the area where your ancestors lived. Find out when it was settled and by whom. Note prominent early settlers and the groups that moved into the area at various times. 

Pay attention to economic patterns, transportation routes, land availability, religious institutions, and political changes. If your ancestor disappears from records for a decade, history may explain why. War, migration booms, boundary changes, epidemics, and religious or ethnic persecution all leave genealogical fingerprints if we know where to look. 

It’s been said that newspapers are the diary of a community. Turn to them for insights into what was happening in the areas where your research is stumbling. Instead of searching for names, read the stories. Were there biases in the area that may have impacted your ancestors? You may find clues in local events, like a factory closing, or weather events like a prolonged drought or catastrophic hurricane. Sometimes we just don’t know what we’re looking for until we start browsing.  

Individual membership in the National Genealogical Society (NGS) comes with free access to NewspaperArchive. (Just log in and access is available from the Learning Center dropdown menu or the link above.) If no newspaper exists for your ancestor’s community, search for a town, township, county name, or the name of a nearby larger city. You may find your ancestor’s community mentioned in papers based in other areas.  

Look for Commonalities in Census Records 

Browsing your ancestor’s neighborhood in the census can reveal trends you’ll never notice by focusing on a single household. Check for people in the area with a birthplace that matches an ancestor’s birthplace elsewhere in your research. 

In later censuses, look at immigration dates for people who share your ancestor’s ethnicity. Do multiple families arrive within a narrow window of time? Do surnames repeat across households, or are you finding surnames that match those of legal witnesses or religious sponsors? These patterns may point to chain migration, shared origins, or extended kinship networks that don’t show up neatly in pedigrees. 

Religious Communities 

Religious communities are often communities within communities, especially for immigrants and minority groups. Churches, synagogues, and other faith institutions served as social anchors, record keepers, and support systems. 

Catholic research, in particular, has taught me this lesson repeatedly. Parish and diocesan boundaries don’t always align with civil ones, and families often traveled farther than expected to attend a church that matched their language or tradition. In some cases, the opposite is true; an absence of churches for an ancestor’s faith may have led them to a similar congregation from another sect or a different religion entirely. 

Baptismal sponsors, marriage witnesses, and burial locations can reveal relationships that civil records never document. If your ancestor seems to vanish from the civil record, ask yourself whether you’ve truly exhausted the religious ones. 

Flex Your Research Muscles 

Sometimes when I’m stumped, I’ll move on to an unrelated case. Don’t have one? Pick a different random family in the area and research the heck out of them—extra credit if they’re in your ancestor’s FAN club (Friends, Associates, Neighbors). 

Even someone unrelated at all might help. Grab an obituary or census record with some solid information and see how far you can get. If you’re working in the same area as your problematic ancestor, you may discover record sets, repositories, or research techniques that then apply directly to your own case. At the very least, you’ll stay sharp and avoid burnout. 

Education 

Sometimes breaking out of a rut requires new information. When we can’t find what we may be missing in records, we often need to learn something new. A new methodology, a record type we’ve avoided, or historical context we’ve overlooked may open doors to unexpected avenues of research. 

The good news is that genealogical education is easier to find than ever. Webinars, conferences, study groups, institutes, and society programs offer targeted learning for every experience level. 

At NGS, it’s literally what we do: education and preservation—and we’re here to help. Take time to browser through our website. You’ll discover great publications including NGS Magazine, The National Genealogical Society Quarterly, and the Upfront blog. NGS also has published many excellent books on specific research topics as well as guidebooks for research across America. Other NGS educational opportunities include workshops and online courses that allow you to work at your own pace. 

If that’s not enough online learning for you, ConferenceKeeper can keep you abreast of many more learning opportunities in the genealogy community, both virtual and in-person. 

And, of course, the NGS Family History Conference provides opportunities for you to learn from the best in the fields as you network with other genealogists who are traveling the same research paths you are. Registration is open for this year’s event in Fort Wayne, home to the world-class genealogy collections and access available at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library. 

When research stalls, investing in yourself as a genealogist may be the most productive research step you take all year. 

City Directories in Family History Research

Using City Directories in Family History Research 

In many large American cities, many residents rented rather than owned their homes. This meant families often moved—sometimes every year. In fact, some cities observed the dreaded tradition known as “Moving Day,” (also known as “May Day”) when most leases ended on 1 May. On that day, residents searching for cheaper rents crowded city streets with carts loaded with all their earthly possessions in the hopes they would make it to their new abode with as little damage as possible.  

It's interesting to note, while many larger cities used 1 May, other cities had traditional dates that varied, particularly October. See this example, from NewspaperArchive (available via your National Genealogical Society membership) from the Macon Telegraph, 1 Oct 1898 (p. 8, col. 2). Because of this constant turnover, city directories are invaluable for tracing people year by year.  

Why City Directories Matter 

The predecessors to yesteryears’ phone books, they are much more than a list of names; they provide yearly snapshots of households, neighborhoods, and communities. Directories can help bridge gaps between census years, track migration within a city, and even reveal the organizations and institutions that shaped your ancestor’s daily life. 

City directories place your ancestors at a specific location or address and were typically published annually. In addition to that coveted address, they can reveal your ancestor’s occupation and sometimes a business association and address. 

They are also your guide to your family’s neighborhood. Houses of worship, schools, institutions, and organizations, which your ancestor may have attended. Paired with maps they can reveal their proximity to your family and possibly the location of records your ancestor left in those institutions.  

Cemeteries in the area are typically included, which may aid your search for an ancestor’s final resting place. In later years, larger cemeteries replaced smaller burial grounds and often grew on the outskirts of cities, as the dead were moved further out to create space for the living. Check for maps that may show rail lines that in the past would take the deceased in funeral cars along with mourners to cemeteries.  

Tracking Same-Named Individuals 

My obsession with city directories started as I stared down a search for three generations of James Kellys in New York City in the mid-1800s. With almost a full page of just James Kellys, I didn’t have a lot of hope at first. When I paired them with other Kellys by addresses, I was able to piece together that the family stayed living with or near each other. I also discovered that they were in the business of making artificial flowers for several decades. Once I had these threads that tied them, the family story began to take shape.  

Back in the day, my mom and I sorted entries on index cards. With the advent of technology, spreadsheets became the tool of choice, with columns by first and last name, street number, street name, year, occupation, and directory name.  

Look for identifiers like middle initials as well, to help differentiate your person from others with the same first and last name. Directories sometimes marked Black residents with symbols such as (c) or an asterisk (*). While outdated and offensive today, these notations can help you identify individuals of color in the directory. 

Tips for Using Directories 

• Read the introductory materials. The preface often includes canvassing and publication dates, which give you a better idea of exactly when your ancestor was documented there. Editorial notes can help you interpret abbreviations and symbols used in the text.  
• Look for Maps and Street Guides. Many directories included maps or street directories showing address ranges or cross streets. These resources allow you to reconstruct the layout of a neighborhood and see visually where other family members lived. They can also pinpoint the location of religious and other institutions in the neighborhood where your ancestor may have been active.  
• Reverse Directories. A directory often found within the directory is sometimes available, often at the end of the volume, where residents are listed by address. Look in these bonus sections for familiar names on your ancestor’s street and on those nearby, where you may find more family and associates. 
• Look Beyond People. Advertisements in the directory may relate to your ancestor’s business or occupation and provide color and context. And if they participated in a fraternal organization, you can find that group’s information. If your ancestor was a leader, he may be included by name.  
• Officiants in Religious Records. Officiants listed only by name on civil records can often be connected to a religious organization via city directories in congregational listings where they are named, or in residential listings if they lived at or near the house of worship to which they were affiliated. This connection can lead to other records in that religious community’s archives. 
• Check multiple publishers where available. Directories were big business by the late 1800s and early 1900s, with multiple publishers canvassing many larger cities, competing with each other for completeness and superior content. You may find an ancestor not listed in one, but in another. Even better, an ancestor could be listed in both with a more detailed occupation or a different address, signaling a move around the time of canvassing. 
• County and other directories. Even if your ancestor didn’t live in a large city, they may have been included in a local directory. Look for county directories or directories for the county seat that may have included surrounding residents. (Coverage is often listed on the title page.)  

Finding Directories 

Libraries with large genealogical collections often have runs of city directories among their historical records. The New York Public Library is a wonderful example with directories from the city dating back to the late 1700s. Check university libraries as well as private and public institutions. FamilySearch has a huge collection, as does Ancestry, although it should be noted that at Ancestry they won’t all show up together in a global search of all records.  They should be searched through the collection itself to really work using the search fields and browse functions.  

The Library of Congress, Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books are all also home to large collections of directories.  

As I reflect on the many hours I spent transcribing directories in the old days by hand, I’m feeling gleeful to have these incredible resources at my fingertips now. So the next time you’re facing an urban (or rural) problem finding someone, let your fingers do the walking—through city directories.  

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Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections, Harper’s magazine. (New York: Harper Brothers, written on border, May 1856).