NYC Directory - What is "r" versus "h"?

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Permalink Reply by Catherine Davis on April 18, 2010 at 9:50am

John,
This is not a rookie question since abbreviations can be the bane of all of us. And, yes, the abbreviations are important to your research.
Most city directories include a key to the abbreviations somewhere. Sometimes, they are at the very front of the book, sometimes on the first page of the alphabetic directory, etc. and their meanings can differ from directory to directory, even year to year, so you will need to refer back to the actual directories that you used. For instance, I found the 1915 NYC directory for Manhattan at ancestry.com: the abbreviations were at the top of the alpha list of people: h = house, nr = near, r = rear, etc. But, in another instance, h might mean house, r mean relative of the homeowner, and b mean boarder, etc.

Permalink Reply by John J. Tierney on April 23, 2010 at 8:44am

Catherine,

Thank you! I had looked around for a legend in the copy I was looking at (on Footnote) with no luck, but realize now I needed to be more comprehensive in my look around.

The location in question is the city of Manhattan, so listing some residences as "house" still makes me scratch my head - they are mainly apartment houses.

Also, for anyone else reading this later: I've been going year by year through Footnote's NYC directories and some of the years have pages that are completely out of order.

For example, when the "Tierney" listing I was reading started with the "Johns" at the top of the page, it sometimes took 3 or more page backs to find the actual preceding page that had the start of the Tierney names.

In some cases (curse you 1906 NYC Directory!) I had to go through the image index page by page to find the right names - pages are not sequential or alphabetical in any way I can discern.