City and county directories, as well as tax rolls, serve as an excellent resource in conjunction with or as an alternative to census records. Since they document at least some of the inhabitants of an area at a given point of time they offer, both can be useful in cases where census records no longer exist, or when you've “misplaced” an ancestor between the decennial censuses.

Tax Lists

Early tax lists generally include all white males over the age of twenty-one, and indicate whether they owned land, slaves, or other taxable property. They usually do not include any other personal information. A Google search for tax lists genealogy brings up a wide variety of tax lists online, including 1790/1800 Virginia Tax Lists (www.binnsgenealogy.com/VirginiaTaxListCensuses) and Eighteenth Century Tax Lists of Perquimans County, North Carolina (http://perqtax.homestead.com).

City Directories

City directories are much like phone directories, a listing of an area's residents. They differ, however, in that they predate the invention of the telephone and often provide additional information about the listed individuals, such as the street address, place of employment, occupation, or name of spouse. Some also offer a separate street directory, sometimes referred to as a crisscross or reverse directory. This makes it easier to find neighbors, as well as nearby churches, cemeteries, and schools. City directories are compiled through door-to-door surveys and published at irregular intervals. Because they are published based on sales value, they are generally available only for large cities and communities.

City or county directories are especially useful for tracking families between census years, for locating an individual's place of business, and for learning the layout of the area in which your ancestors lived. They aren't always easy to find, however. The Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/rr/microform/uscity) has a large collection of U.S. city directories available on microfilm. While they are not available for online perusal or through interlibrary loan, the list of available directories can be browsed for clues to cities and years in which city directories were published. City Directories of the United States of America (www.uscitydirectories.com) presents an organized directory of links to city directories that have been microfilmed along with the repositories where the microfilm copies can be accessed. It also includes links to city directory transcriptions that have been made available online. Ancestry.com offers indexes and browsable images of more than 10,000 city directories from cities and states across the United States in its U.S. City Directories collection (http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1540), covering the years 1820 through 1960. Footnote.com also has a number of early twentieth- and late nineteenth-century city directories in its online collection.