Now is probably as good a time as any to remind folks about a very nice and FREE website that helps with Boston research. I am not associated with the folks who put together or maintain this database; I just find it quite useful. Damrell's Fire has a searchable database, http://www.damrellsfire.com/cgi-bin/directory_search.pl , for seven Boston City Directories. Five, which include the 1845, 1850, 1855, 1865, and 1875, have just the names in the database. They also have full contents for the 1870 and 1872 directories. The complete contents give you a leg up looking for certain things like street locations, ward boundaries (extremely helpful for paging through census images), and churches. If you have an address and would like to find what is near by. Take Albany St for example. Go to the Complete Contents of the 1870 directory, click on Boston Street Directory, and you will see the streets that start with A, and Albany is there. The street information is right by its name, in this case they tell you Albany runs from 83 Beach to 88 Eustis and that it runs through wards 7, 8, 10, 11, and 13. Below it you will see Left and Right street numbers and the cross streets. If you were looking for someone at 75 Albany Street, you would spot 88 on the left, 85 on the right with a cross street of Harvard. Next, go back to the 1870 complete contents main page and choose Churches and Ministries. If you know the denomination, look for it and then check the addresses they are located at. In this case, St James Roman Catholic Church is on Harvard at the corner of Albany and it also gives the names of the priests, which matches the previous query for the Rev. William Corcoran. If you want to use the directory to help find which ward a street address is located at and the street name runs through several wards like Albany does, just look up the ward for the neighboring cross streets and you have it. At least with Ancestry.com, instead of querying a name, you can drop down below that, go to the state, then the county, and depending, finally the town, to look at the enumeration districts. Since Boston census pages are segregated by wards, look up the district's description and you can fairly easily find the one or two enumeration districts that covers the address you are looking for. This is extremely handy for places like Newman St (where my grandfather and two of his siblings lived), which disappeared off the face of the map when the Old Colony Housing Project came it. It is also very helpful for East Boston, which lost a number of streets to Logan International Airport. Obviously, you can just do a search on the name and see what comes up. I do have scanned copies of the 1900 street directory. And if you are lucky or cursed enough to be looking for the same surnames of Burke, Kenney, McCarthy, McGaffigan, that I am, I may already have the scanned images for those pages for a number of the directories from the 1880 to 1910 timeframe, plus some of the others. I frequently visit my local FHC and can do some lookups. I hope this makes sense and you find it helpful in tracking down your ancestors. Best of luck to you and may your brick walls come tumbling down. Sue Richart In the snowy and cold foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains of Eastern Washington State