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Dingwall piper entry, from the 1861 Toronto City Directory, by W. R. Brown Buchanan family entries, from the Rochester (New York) City Directory, 1894, showing removal to Newport, RI A second Dingwall piper entry, on the following page, from the 1861 Toronto City Directory, by W. R. Brown Anne L. Dingwall entry, from the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) City Directories, 1882, showing her death date before Angus, living at the address identified as “ft Granger.” And in fact when Angus first appears in the directory in 1894–95, he is listed as boarding at “ft Granger pl.” In that same volume, I was surprised to learn that the Buchanans had actually left Rochester, for their listing read: “Buchanan, Thomas D removed to Newport, R.I.” 5 Instead of dismay over my family’s sudden disappearance, the city directory had actually provided me with a forwarding address! Note that the Rochester, New York city directories 1827-1899 are now online (free of charge) at the Monroe County (NY) Library System website. Eventually all directories through 1930 will be online at the site. See: www.libraryweb.org/rochcitydir/citydirectoriestable.html. Besides names of spouses and children who still live at home, city directories can actually provide specific dates of death, which may then help the researcher to obtain genealogically rich documents produced as a result of that death, such as probate papers, the death certificate, an obituary, or cemetery records. The Watsons’ aunt, Anne Lambert Dingwall, was included in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1917 directory, giving the important information: “Dingwall Anne L (82) died Oct. 16 ‘16.” 6 Other genealogical treasures also await the researcher in the older directories that sometimes included much more than names, professions, and addresses. My Dingwall ancestors immigrated to Toronto from Scotland in the 1840s, so I, of course, looked for Toronto directories. Some volumes are available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and I had gathered all the listings from those. But then I made the happy discovery of the Toronto Public Library Digital Collections, found online at http://digit.tpl. toronto.on.ca:8000/. York County and Toronto City Directories from 1833–1881 have been digitized and put on the Internet with a search engine. Many more city directory volumes are available here than I had been able to access in Salt Lake, but best of all is the search engine. It searches everything included in the directory, not just the alphabetical listings with home addresses. Thus, by doing a search for DINGWALL in the 1859–61 directories, I was led to scanned images of the pages that contained National Societies, where I found my immigrant third-great-grandfather Ronald Dingwall included as a piper for both the Canadian Highland Society and the St. Andrew’s Society. 7 He hadn’t shown up in the alphabetical listing because he was living in nearby Hamilton with his widowed daughter-in-law. By this time, I had already accumulated census enumerations, tax lists, and probate papers for Ronald, but learning that he had played the bagpipes for societies commemorating his homeland was a very poignant discovery for me. To find city directories in your own research, check the online card catalogue for the Salt Lake Family 22 © Ev e r t o n’s Ge n e a l o g i c a l He l p e r Ja n ua ry/Fe b r u a r y 2009
History Library catalogue at www.familysearch.org/ Eng/Library/FHLC/frameset fhlc.asp to determine what microfilms you can order to view at your local Family History Center. But don’t stop there. Take advantage of Ancestry.com’s online city directories, available by subscription, that help fill the void of the missing 1890 census. Write to local libraries and ask what volumes they have in their collections. And don’t be dismayed if your ancestors didn’t live in large cities. Some medium and small sized towns have directories as well. Check every year that is appropriate, and be flexible about the dates you think would produce results. Look for married daughters’ names, and of course remember to check for spelling variations. Finally, the lack of an entry doesn’t mean your ancestor wasn’t in that location at that time. Another of the Watson siblings, an unmarried daughter who followed nursing, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lived there for over 30 years. Yet she appears only sporadically, nine different times, in the city directories. Sometimes, people had to pay a small fee to be included. So keep checking for every available volume that could reasonably turn up the individual or family. I hope you uncover a gem! End Notes 1 Winnipeg Alphabetical Directory, 1882, p. 198, courtesy of Centennial Library, 251 Donald St., Winnipeg, Manitoba. 2 Ibid., 1883, p. 366. 3 Ibid., 1884, p. 299. 4 Rochester (New York) City Directories, 1916, microfilm (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1980–1984), p. 1319, FHL 1,612,075. 5 Ibid., 1894, p. 117, FHL 1,377,397. 6 Milwaukee (Wisconsin) City Directories, 1917, microfilm (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1980–1984), p. 438, FHL 1,611,776. 7 York and Toronto City Directories Pages, Toronto Public Library Digital Collections, 8 February 2006. Patricia Dingwall Thompson has taught English for 37 years, currently at Bozeman High School in Bozeman, Montana. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Arizona State University and a Master’s Degree from Phillips University. She and her husband Jim (who also teaches English at the same school) became involved with genealogy after a trip to Tricia’s ancestral village of Dingwall in the Scottish Highlands in 1996. Tricia is a board certified genealogist and has published articles in The New Hampshire Genealogical Record and Everton’s Genealogical Helper. Ja n ua ry/Fe b r u a r y 2009 Ev e r t o n’s Ge n e a l o g i c a l He l p e r © 23
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