Adams County, Nebraska, U.S., Directory, 1890

Adams County, Nebraska lies about 120 miles west of the Missouri River and 24 miles from the south line of the state. The county is among the best for farming in the state and contains an area of 576 square miles, or an acreage of 368,640 acres. This database is a transcription of a rural directory for the county that was originally published in 1890. It lists the farmers who were residents of Adams County at that time and the post office where they received their mail. Some post offices included on this list were not in Adams County, but the farms were. The directory includes the following out-of-county post offices: Bladen, Blue Hill, and Negunda in Webster County; Campbell in Franklin County; Central City in Merrick County; and Stromsberg in Polk County. This directory served as a shipping information reference for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1890 and 1891.

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).