Wednesday, January 7, 2009

More Midwestern city directories at Internet Archive

Besides Indianapolis, Internet Archive's best midwestern city directory holdings are in Fort Wayne, Indiana (overlapping the Footnote collection) and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

Once again, I didn't find a good way to get the results in order, but for Urbana-Champaign I found directories for 1878-9, 1883-4, 1885, 1890, 1893, 1895-6, 1898, 1898-9, 1900, 1902-3, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1916, 1918, 1919-20, 1921, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1940. Most also cover outlying areas of Champaign County. They also have a 1916 directory for the University of Illinois, said to include all 35,000 people ever associated with it up to that time.

For Indiana's second largest city, Internet Archive has 1858-9, 1860, 1862, 1864-5, 1866-7 (Williams), 1867 (Bailey's gazetteer), 1868-9, 1870-1, 1873-4, 1875-6, 1876-7, 1877, 1882-3, 1883-4, 1885-6, 1888 (called "v. 11 pt. 2"), 1898, 1902, 1903, 1906, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1919. Again, many cover more of Allen County.

In the less-ideal-but-still-useful category, IA has a scattering of other directories. In Michigan, there's Saginaw (1915). In Illinois, they have Chicago (so-called 1855 and 1856, which are actually 1855-6 and a May 1856 supplement), Shelbyville (1909), and Galena (1854). In Indiana you can check out Valparaiso (1893), Kokomo (1910-11), Lafayette (1909-10), and Michigan City (1909-10). I'm not personally acquainted with all these towns, but you can pretty much expect to find many more directory years for each one in the right physical library.

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