When a singer has an incredibly good voice, people will sometimes say that they could "sing the phone book" and it would be good. The underlying thought is that phone books are an inherently boring read and only Ol' Blue Eyes (or insert your crooner-of-choice here) could make it interesting.Poppycock! Even if you are cursed with something less than a Golden Throat, be assured that you could still sing the words from our collection of Rochester City Directories and put a song in the heart of local historians.
Lets talk about phone books for a minute. Okay, when they're not new any more and start piling up in your garage, they aren't all that exciting. But like John Travolta, if they hang around long enough through a period of pointless direct-to-video offerings, the fickle public once again embraces their charms.
Enter Rochester City Directories. We've got them here at the library going back as far as 1911. What good are they? Well, first off, a City Directory is a little bit more than a phone book. Way back when, in addition to your phone number (and some of the earliest ones aren't particularly chock full of phone numbers as the "telephone technology" hadn't quite caught on yet), City Directories listed the people who lived in the town and also listed their occupations (even if your occupation was "high school student"). If you're interested in local history or family genealogy, your Spider Sense should be fully a-tingle. These books are treasure troves of historical information!
Want to know who lived in your house in years gone by? You can look up any property by its street address and find out who owned (and quite possibly who lived) in it. You can also see what the businesses of the day were.
You want a list of farmers in Olmsted County in 1923 (and, really, who doesn't?), check out the directory. You can see which churches, businesses, and politicians were around at that time.
Lots of this information is not available from any other source (sorry Google, you don't have EVERYTHING yet). Another reason to visit your good ol' Rochester Public Library. Because of their historical significance (and their irreplaceable nature), we do keep our City Directories archived in the Magazine Room (far back left corner of the 2nd floor as you're coming up the stairs or elevator). You can read them while you're here (and we have one of those photocopy machines if you find something good.) The upside is that they are never checked out, so they will be here when you visit.
A whole Historical Rochester awaits!
