Thanks to a grant from the South Central Regional Library Council (SCRLC), The Steele Memorial Library was able to digitize the pages to their most fragile city directories and share them with researchers online. City directories are a great research tool. Like phone books, they list people’s names and addresses in a city for a given year. But even better than phonebooks, they often list the person’s occupation as well. These books are a great way to supplement genealogy and local history research. They are helpful to find people in between census years as well as locate local businesses and addresses.
NY Heritage Digital Collections is a free site made up of submissions from libraries, archives, museums, and special collections around New York State that make New York State primary source materials available freely to researchers and students worldwide.
The Steele Memorial Library has previously digitized and shared early local yearbooks, atlases, and postcard images to this site. We are thrilled to be able to offer city directories now as well.
Here is the direct link to the collection on NYS Heritage: https://nyheritage.org/collections/elmira-city-directories
Here you will find city directories from 1860-1924 online. The local city directories include people and businesses in Elmira, NY as well as neighboring towns in Chemung County.
To see all of Steele Memorial Library’s collections available online, please visit our digital collections page on our website under the genealogy tab. Here is a direct link: https://ccld.lib.ny.us/digital-collections/
