Canton, Stark County, Ohio, USA, befolkningsförteckning, 1913

Canton, Ohio is located in Stark County, which is in the northeastern area of the state. This database indexes a city directory for Canton in 1913. The city's estimated population in that year was 57,474. This database lists each person's name, occupation, and place of residence, along with his or her spouse's name.

Canton's history goes back to 1769. The first lots were plotted and sold in 1806, and the first log cabin and the first road in Canton were built in 1807. The first post office was established in 1809. The first schoolhouse was built in 1811. Canton was incorporated as a town in 1834 and as a city in 1854. Today, Canton is one of America's leading industrial areas, manufacturing more than 1,500 different products. It is also known for dairy products and poultry farms.

City directories are primarily useful for locating people in a particular place and time. They can tell you generally where an ancestor lived and give an exact location for census years. They are also useful for linkage with sources other than censuses.

There are usually several parts to a city directory. The section of most interest to the genealogist, of course, is the alphabetical listing of names, for it is there that you may find your ancestor.

Whenever you use a directory, however, it is important to refer to the page showing abbreviations used in the alphabetical section of the directory, usually following the name in each entry. Some abbreviations are quite common, such as h for home or r, indicating residence. There may even be a subtle distinction between r for residents who are related to the homeowner and b for boarders who are not related.

Some city directories list adult children who lived with their parents but were working or going to school. Look for persons of the same surname residing at the same address. If analyzed and interpreted properly, these annual directories can tell you (by implication) which children belong to which household, when they married and started families of their own, and when they established themselves in business. In cases where specific occupation is given, you can search records pertinent to that occupation.

Once an ancestor has been found in a city directory, there are several ways the information can be used to gain access to, or link with, such sources as censuses, death and probate records, church records, naturalization records, and land records.

Taken from Chapter 11: Research in Directories, The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy by Gordon Lewis Remington; edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated, 1997).

Updates:
21 May 2021: Additional records created though database improvements.