These annual precursors-to-telephone directories display a person’s home address, but also often a spouse name, occupation, and work address. And since they were largely published every year, they can be powerful tools used to find where your ancestors lived and worked between the decennial U.S. federal censuses.

But, City Directories—innocuous as they seem—can be wolves in sheep’s clothing.  You may think you’re cracking open a boring old phone book, but, if you look closer, you might be able to piece together loads of biographical information.

For instance, I was researching one of our early city librarians (and the namesake of our fabulous online digital collection), Tessa Kelso. She was city librarian from 1889 to 1895, but none of the federal censuses before, during or after that timespan feature her in Los Angeles. The 1880 census has Tessa living as a 17-year-old with her parents in Cincinnati; the 1890 census is not available (most of it burned up); and the 1900 census has her living in New York.

So, looking at the Los Angeles area city directories we’ve digitized and have available on our website, I found her in the 1893 and 1894 city directories and strung together the following information:

In 1893, Tessa was an unmarried woman living two blocks away from the Los Angeles Free Public Library, at which she was the librarian. She lived at 455 South Broadway in what looked to be an apartment building known as “The Acacia.” Doing a search using “455 South Broadway” as my keywords, I found seven other people also living at this address, including Miss Adelaide R. Hasse, who was “first assistant librarian” at the Free Public Library.

In 1894, I found both Adelaide and Tessa were now living at 347 S. Hill Street (which appears to be where Angel’s Flight is now—also only two blocks from the library). Three other people lived at this address, so it may have been a small apartment building. Both women still worked for the library and Tessa was on the Board of Directors, according to the section of the directory devoted to governmental listings.

This information—spare as it seems to be—is full of narrative possibilities and gives me many things to think about when considering Tessa’s life. Such as…
What might it have been like for Tessa being a single woman with a notable job?
Was it safe/what was it like to live downtown in 1893?
Were Adelaide and Tessa romantically involved, since they were unmarried and moved from residence to residence together?
Later, I found a Washington, D.C. city directory that showed them living at the same address in D.C. in 1896, after they’d both resigned from the Los Angeles library.

We currently have 185 directories of all sorts (not just city directories) available online for you to rummage through and dig up stories. Just go to Rescarta and infer away!

To learn more about the esteemed Tessa Kelso, read this dynamite blog article written by our Literature Department’s James Sherman: Tessa Kelso: Library Hall of Famer | Los Angeles Public Library (lapl.org)