Death Dates in US-City Directories

Last week I was doing some indexing at FamilySearch.org. One of the record sets I indexed was US-City Directories, 1902-1935 [Part I]. While indexing this record set, I noticed that some of the entries included the age of the person and a death date. Here is a screenshot of one of them.

Wow! I don't remember seeing this kind of vital event information in US-City Directories before during my personal family history research.

I looked up United States Directories in the FamilySearch Research Wiki and saw that death dates are included in the long list of potential content found in directories.¹ How awesome is that?!

These death dates should be taken as clues that can help us find the actual death record for an ancestor. While preparing this post, I did more research in US-City Directories and found another person with a death date and age next to their name.² (This is not one of my ancestors.)

Highlighted in this directory is a Bernard M. Desenberg (aged 74) who died on September 14, 1901. I did a search for his death certificate and found it in Ancestry.com. His death certificate listed his death date as September 27, 1901.³ So, yes, the death date listed in the US-City Directory is a helpful clue, but as you can see, his death day was incorrectly listed as 14 in the directory instead of 27.

I was curious about the source of the death information found in US-City Directories. And I found my answer at the Library of Congress website. I learned from their US-City Directories Research Guide that "City directories are compiled through door-to-door surveys...."⁴ Interesting! So, it's possible that whoever was providing information to the survey-taker that day gave the wrong day of death for Bernard M. Desenberg. But, they were correct about the month and year of Mr. Desenberg's death.

US-City Directories are fantastic resources. I found another interesting and helpful item that can be found in US-City Directories. I'll share more about that in an upcoming post.

Thanks for stopping by!

Jana

© 2024 Copyright by Jana Iverson Last, All Rights Reserved

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1 FamilySearch Wiki (www.familysearch.org/wiki), “United States Directories,” rev. 03:29, 21 March 2024.^↩
2 U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995, image 121 of 355, Bernard M. Desenberg; image, “Kalamazoo, Michigan, City Directory, 1902.”, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 4 September 2024). ^↩
3 U.S. City Directories, Library of Congress, (www.guides.loc.gov/united-states-city-telephone-directories/city-directories, accessed 4 September 2024).^↩
4 "Michigan, U.S., Death Records, 1867-1952," database with images, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 4 September 2024); certificate image, Bernard M. Desenberg, 27 September 1901, no. 400; citing Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics; Lansing, Michigan.^↩