09 February 2010

St. Louis Directories at Footnote.com

I've been working with St. Louis directories at Footnote.com for an upcoming column in Casefile Clues. I've been finding several entries for one family I am working on. Footnote.com lets me search all the directories for one city at the same time, which is really nice.

What I would like to be able to do however, is have the results sorted by year of directory publication. In the case I'm working on, I need directories from ca. 1860 until about 1875 when the individual under study died. I certainly do not need the entries after 1890 and having the years appear in my search results in an apparently random fashion slows me down.

Don't get me wrong. The ability to search these directories all at once from my own home is convenient. But there's always room for a little tweaking!