Research the history of your home - tutorial three: Census and city directory records

In our sources series we have covered maps and deeds, which both tell you who owned your house. But who lived in your house?

The most detailed sources for answering that question are census records, which will be familiar to anyone who has done genealogical research. From 1790 to 1840, census records will tell you the name of the head of household; from 1850 to 1940, they will tell you the name of every person in the household, as well as other helpful information such as their age, race, occupation, and place of birth. Using census records, you can start to develop a profile of the former inhabitants of your home.

That’s all well and good, but how can you find out who lived in your home if you don’t have a name? While you cannot search directly by address, on both ancestry.com and familysearch.org you can browse the census records until you find your address. The Melrose census was divided by ward, and ward boundaries haven’t changed much since 1850. Simply open up the year you want to search, find your ward, and start reading through the scanned images. Eventually, you will find your street, and your address—unless you are searching before 1900, in which case there will be no street numbers, as Melrose did not yet have them.

One weakness of census data is that it was only compiled every ten years. Fortunately, street directories and lists of persons are helpful sources for covering the years in between. The Melrose Public Library has a full collection of street directories dating back to 1872; while the library is closed, ancestry.com has a smaller collection dating back to about the same time. Street directories usually only tell you the head of household, but often reveal the work address of that person, which is not revealed in the census. Lists of persons were compiled by the City of Melrose starting in 1916, and list all of the eligible voters in the household; the MPL has a collection of these documents stretching down nearly to the present day.

While the library is closed, they have arranged for you to have free home access to ancestry.com, which you can find here: https://www.melrosepubliclibrary.org/alerts/ancestry-com/.