Watchdog Wednesday with Randy Seaver

Most readers of this blog probably need no introduction to the endlessly prolific Geneablogger From the Lower Left-Hand Corner of the United States, but on Watchdog Wednesday I still want to call attention to Randy Seaver's good work on tracking the curious history of Footnote Pages. Since he writes faster than I can read, I'm not going to link to his every posting on these subjects. Track him yourself. You have been warned.

Watchdog Wednesday with Genealogy Bank in Cincinnati

[A series dedicated to keeping up with the quirks of the indispensable big indexing companies, and suggesting workarounds or even actual changes to deal with them...]

Late last month I searched for a man who might well have been mentioned in a Cincinnati newspaper during 1856. I examined the list of six Cincinnati newspapers at Genealogy Bank's Historical Newspapers, and found two with the right coverage -- "Cincinnati Daily Gazette (1835-1883)" and the "Whig (1802-1882)." (Since the coverage varies between the library subscription and the individual subscription, I'm not sure you'll find the same listings on the library version.)

No results for his surname, no results for common surnames, and no results when I left all the search terms blank and hit the search key. I had been prepared not to find him, but I had not been prepared to find nobody at all. Hmmm...

Eventually I found that a blank search on these two papers for the years 1845-1866 yielded 77 hits, and a blank search for the years 1846-1867 yielded 29,074 hits. But a blank search of 1846-1866 yielded -- nothing.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is GenealogyBank claiming to index 20 years' worth of two newspapers when they don't have a single issue up?

I posted the above on a mailing list earlier, and received two helpful suggestions but no answers to the main question. The Library of Congress's newspaper directory suggests that GB may suffer in part from a typo problem, as there doesn't seem to be any Whig paper of those dates in Cincinnati (and in fact since the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850s we shouldn't expect there to be one).

Meanwhile, it looks like I should follow this trail the old-fashioned way: my Indiana State Library appears to have relevant issues of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, and their account of what they hold appears to be much more specific, showing the gaps.

Watchdog Wednesday

[A series dedicated to keeping up with the quirks of the indispensable big indexing companies, and suggesting workarounds or even actual changes to deal with them...]

Footnote.com's collections of city directories are admirable for offering images rather than transcriptions, and for covering long continuous spans of time (any one year's directory can be wacko).

Unfortunately, they also rely on the notion that there was only one directory for each city for each calendar year. After 1875, that was pretty much true in Chicago -- where most of my experience lies. But prior to that time there were often competing directory companies, which often adhered to different publication schedules. Footnote has dealt with this by interleaving all the different directories that it has assigned to the same year. (That's right, all page 4s appear one after the other. City directories are notorious for random and inconsistent pagination in various sections anyway; this just makes it worse.)

Under "1856," for instance, Footnote compiles together three different Chicago directories. (Note -- to use these links you must either be a subscriber or use a library that subscribes.)

Hall's Business Directory of Chicago (Chicago: Hall & Company, 1856), published 1 November 1856.

Business Card of John Gager & Co. Being a Mercantile Record of the Business Men of Chicago (Chicago: Solis, Zeller, Dow & Co., 1856), published 1 October 1856.

John Gager, comp., Gager's Chicago City Directory for the Year Ending June 1st, 1857 (Chicago: John Gager & Co., 1856), published 1 December 1856.

For any given page being viewed, the careful user can tell which book s/he is looking at by checking under "publisher" in the "About This Document" sidebar that Footnote thoughtfully provides. Careful researchers will be alert to this because they know that there is no such animal as the "Chicago City Directory for 1856." The careless user may not know this, or may not notice -- and may search the year for a target surname, get one result or none, and go away satisfied -- but without having viewed the comparable pages in the competing directories. I don't know of a way to search any one of these three directories by itself.

This was a competitive business with a short time horizon, not a public utility. I'm sure Mr. Gager would be astonished to know that we are still using (and misusing) his ephemeral compilations in the 21st century.