Rochester City Directories

Frequently Asked Questions about city directories - answers some common user questions.

The Rochester City Directory collection is housed in the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County. The collection consists of the original bound volumes beginning with the year 1827. The library also owns the fifteen-volume set of the Rochester House Directory, a supplement to the city directories. Many of the City Directory and House Directory volumes are extremely fragile, resulting in limited availability to the public.

The house directories cover the years from 1892 to 1920 and list the occupants of city houses according to street address. These can be found by clicking on the supplement link which is listed along with the relevant year. If a year is not listed, no directory exists for that year. Also, beginning with 1922, the information given in the house directories was included at the back of the main city directories.

Select a decade:

Local General and Business Directories

The various local general and business directories have more information on the towns and villages of Monroe and surrounding counties than the Rochester City Directories do. If your search takes you to these areas, these directories may be of use to you.

To view the directories, your web browser will need the free Adobe Reader® plug-in. If you don't already have this installed, you can download a free copy from Adobe®.

Each of the directories has optical character recognition (OCR) capability, so you can click on a hyperlinked title and use Adobe Reader’s® search feature to find information quickly. The tables are sorted by area or topic, then date, then title.