I took a second look at the 1878 directory of Illinois farmers in the “U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989″ at Ancestry.com. My gut reaction is that the directory itself is not as thorough as one would hope.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I had hoped to find a few missing ancestors from the southern part of Hancock County in the entries for bordering Adams County–under the assumption that the directory was organized by post office and that the post offices for these individuals were somehow classified in Adams County.
I did manage to find ggg-grandfather Bernard Dirks!
No such luck.
A manual search of the locations in the northern part of Adams County that could logically include Hancock County’s Walker or Rock Run Townships (Loraine, Lima, Mendon, etc.) included no references to any Rampleys or Trautvetters. In all honesty, some of the sections looked a little sparse in terms of how many names were listed. Based upon having read the corresponding 1880 census for some of the locations manually, the number of names did not seem quite high enough.
Of course, my conclusion is based on an anecdotal observation and not any sort of scientific study of the names compared to the census. And….it’s also worth noting that this directory is organized by post office address and the census (in most rural areas of the United States in 1880) is pretty much taken along civil township lines.
Which made me wonder how the addresses were compiled and if there were any other criteria for inclusion other than being a “farmer.”
The directory was compiled by the “P. R. Mast & Company, Buckeye Agricultural Works” of Springfield, Ohio, and contains a copyright statement on one of the prefatory pages:
It’s entirely possible that the list was originally based upon some customer list. Possibly.
But it’s always worth remembering that any compilation is only as complete as the compiler intended it to be and what his purpose was in compiling the record.
And that’s not something that’s always clearly stated.
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