New U.S. City Directories Database at Ancestry.com

On Tuesday, The Generations Network, Inc. released the new U.S. City Directories database on Ancestry.com. While they've had thousands of city directories on the site for some years now, many of these databases contain no page images, and the ones that do mostly contain bi-tonal black and white images (not grayscale).

This new release adds tremendous value to their U.S. city directories collection in the following ways:

* it adds 50 million names in 1,100 city directories from 45 states and Washington, D.C.,

* these directories are concentrated around the year 1890, which bolsters their 1890 Census Substitute collection,

* most of these city directories have never been published before online,

* the images in this collection are high-quality greyscale, much clearer than previous collections.

Thousands more high-quality and unique city directories will be added to this database over the next several months.