Today, I am writing as I explore. I’ve heard about occupational directories, but I’ve never used one for research, so I decided to check them out.
Occupational directories are pretty self explanatory – the are directories of people who share an occupation or a skilled trade.
The term would have been more in use in the 1800s and early 1900s and has been superceded by today’s professional directories.
Where can these occupational directories be found and are they accessible online?
My first search brought up a link to Ancestry’s Professional & Organizational Directories.
Notice that a name search can be done or collections can be browsed by locations. The Featured Data Collections section mentions deceased American physicians and Irish flax growers in 1796 as two of the choices. There is also a description of the collection at the bottom which indicates that ethnic, political and military directories might also be found here. Close, but not really directories of people who shared an occupation, but worth a look.
Next, I came across Professional Directories on a now static Rootsweb page, which originally appeared in “Directories” by Gordon L. Remington, FASG, FUGA in The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy.
Historical occupational directories weren’t coming up in the list, so I added “historical” to my original “occupational directories” key word search and up popped FamilySearch:
The wiki article is quite lengthy, but further down, I found:
I then searched New Jersey, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and California to see what FamilySearch has.
As you can see, choices are very limited in New Jersey and Massachusetts, although Massachusetts’ list is a bit more interesting with registered embalmers in 1909 and photographers from 1839-1900.
Wisconsin had nothing listed, while California’s entries were also sparse:
Morbid curiosity led me to read the 1909 booklet on Massachusetts’ embalmers. The booklet is digitized with 45 images. Pages 9-37 list all the licensed embalmers.
The asterisk indicates that the embalmer was also an undertaker, which I take to mean he ran a funeral home. Notice, too, that the third man on this page, Harry R. Adams, is from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. I’m sure that was because a huge number of New Brunswick residents went to Massachusetts to work for a while or to permanently settle. When a person passed away, some of the bodies were sent back home for burial.
What I’ve discovered is that unless a researcher is looking for professional people like doctors and lawyers, occupational directories are quite scarce in the United States.
Europe had a well-developed apprentice system to train tradesmen and it appears that those types of occupational directories were much more common. Here is the FamilySearch list for England:
I’m also finding that many of the directories that can be located are published books in the FamilySearch Library.
My last try at locations occupational directories was Internet Archive. That search brought up manuals detailing different types of jobs and occupations, but not a list of those who worked in a specific type of job.
The next best thing was a regular city business directory. Here is a page from Gazlay’s San Francisco, California directory for 1861:
The takeaway from this is that, for the United States, a regular business directory search is the way to go. Searching for single-profession directories will yield few results. More success will likely be found in a European search, but even then, most of the options don’t appear to have been digitized.
