United States City and Business Directories, ca. 1749 - ca. 1990
I've tried searching this record collection using this link:
As a test, I searched for my grandfather using his name, place of residence (using a standardized city and state), and a range of dates spanning his entire life. I get a list of results and every single one has a location indexed as simply "United States." Going through the results, they can be from anywhere across the entire country - Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, etc - whereas I was searching for Virginia.
It appears that the states, cities and counties in this collection have not been indexed. Without this data, the results are not very useful.
Answers
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Sometimes, as the message says, "less is more."
I've been working this week on a Morris family, born in Ireland, and living in New Jersey, beginning about 1875. I have seen quite a few references in the city directory database on one of the for-pay sites, so I knew that Cornelius Morris was likely to be found in the directories on FS.
I entered his given and surname, with New Jersey as the place, and nothing else. The top results are the man I am researching. If I mark his given name, Cornelius, exact, then the results are even more precise. https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.anyPlace=New%20Jersey%2C%20United%20States&q.givenName=Cornelius&q.givenName.exact=on&q.surname=Morris&f.collectionId=3754697
Cornelius lived in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey. The search results show the county but not the city, likely because the directories covered several towns/cities within the county.
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