board of trade. Business directories are less satisfactory than telephone directories, which contain all the business concerns of any size and are revised oftener. There are also special telephone directories in which subscribers are classified by the nature of their business.

In some states year books are published that contain lists of the public officials of the state and counties, lists of city and town officers, salaries, terms of office, the membership of the legislature, its committees, the court calendars, the banks and newspapers of the state, county maps, etc. A few cities publish a civil list of all city officials and clerks, with their addresses and salaries.

There are a number of trade directories such as the one issued by the American Iron and Steel Association, Hendrick's Commercial Register of the United States for buyers and sellers, etc.

Professional directories of the clergymen of a given denomination, of the lawyers of a given city, of the physicians, of the public school teachers, etc., are valuable. Many religious denominations publish a year book for the whole country which may not only be used in getting more accurately the name of a clergyman in a distant place, but may discover there a very serviceable correspondent. A few cities publish special directories of their social agencies, public and private, and of the medical, educational, remedial, and custodial resources of the community.

The following instances illustrate both the value and the method of using directories:

A charity organization society telegraphed to a sister society a thousand miles away in the East that it had been applied to for a loan by two women who formerly lived in this eastern town at addresses unknown. Search of a city directory five years back gave an entry of removal to another state, but an earlier directory gave a city address. Inquiry in the neighborhood revealed their former church attendance, and the minister of the church was able to give a sympathetic picture of the background and characteristics of these clients.

The head master of an English school wrote to an American charity organization society to discover the whereabouts of a brother, who had left England eighteen years before and had not been heard from for fifteen years. At that time he was living in a small town in the same state as the society, but had his mail sent to a railroad office by which he was employed in the society's own city. The town

1 The New York Public Library has a large collection of the directories of American cities, going back in some instances as far as the '60's. It also has many Canadian and English directories.

directory of nine years back in the smaller place gave the man's address at a hospital where he had served as porter, but the hospital had lost all trace of him. A clergyman in the town was appealed to, who learned that the man went to a large city in another state after he left the hospital, and had married there, maiden name of wife unknown. The charity organization society in that city was written to and asked to search marriage records and back numbers of its city directory. The marriage records revealed nothing, but the city directory did give an English family of the same name, who became interested in the search and found the missing brother after two months' delay.

On p. 196 the story is told of a homeless man, Albert Gough, who was found to have escaped from an insane asylum and whose whereabouts was revealed to his relatives sixteen years after he had last been heard from. The process of finding these relatives is what now concerns us. Gough's address sixteen years ago in another state and city was sent to the charity organization society there, with the name of a suburb in which he had also lived, and the name of the husband of his sister Martha, one Joseph Flynn, who had formerly worked for a firm of Jones on Water Street. Another sister, Alice, was the wife of Peter O'Brian. These relatives were all found in five days, and the method used was as follows:

All the names mentioned in the letter of inquiry were first carefully looked up in the confidential exchange. None of the names was found there, and the inquiry was turned over to one of the society's least experienced workers with the sole suggestion that a city directory was often a case worker's best friend. After a careful search of every city directory between the years 1890 and 1910, a list was made of the Joseph Flynns, Peter and Alice O'Brians, and Albert Goughs contained in each, with their occupations and home addresses. The total entries thus listed were 56. Notwithstanding Gough's statement that he had not lived in the city for sixteen years, it seemed worth while to search the directory for his name as well Nothing was found, however, more recent than 1893, when an Albert Gough had been employed as carpenter and had boarded on Camden Street, in the neighborhood of Norton, the suburb where Gough claimed to have been. This gave some hope from the very start that his story was true.

Then came the important task of drawing the right inferences from this mass of material. The investigator put her wits to work and decided that only Flynns and O'Brians who were living in the city sixteen years ago would surely warrant a following-up, and that of these only those recorded as still living there could easily be traced. Only one Joseph Flynn clue fulfilled both these conditions. The following day, therefore, with lively expectations of at once discovering Gough's brotherin-law, the worker made a call at this one address, to find that the family had moved. She made another call at their new address, discovered with difficulty, to find that they were all out for the day. To save time, therefore, and to allow for the possibility that this Joseph Flynn might not be the one that she was seeking, she decided to work also from the other end and try to discover whether this Flynn, an upholsterer, was identical with a Flynn, a belt maker, who from 1890 to 1904 had boarded in another part of the city.

1 See p. 303 sq.

The neighborhood proved Jewish, and children volunteered the information that "no Christians live down here." Proprietors of nearby grocery and clothing shops were also ignorant of Flynns, but at last a young woman in a bake shop was found who remembered the family very well; the father, an upholsterer, had died nine years ago, and his son, a belt maker, had moved to Duane Street. The young woman did not know whether the younger Flynn's wife was named Martha or not, but her age corresponded with the probable age of Albert Gough's sister. Duane Street corresponded with an address found in the directory for 1905, and assured the investigator that this was the same family that she had been seeking the day before. As they would not be home until the following day, she devoted a part of the afternoon to looking up a Mrs. Alice O'Brian and making sure that she was not Gough's sister. Early the next morning a visit to the first family of Flynns left her very downhearted, as, despite the fact that her name was Martha, Mrs. Flynn proved not to be the sister. Thus the clue offered by the case worker's best friend, the directory, proved elusive. There remained, however, the Jones firm on Water Street, for the letter of inquiry had mentioned this additional clue, fortunately, and it was found from an old directory that a hardware firm, Jones Brothers, had been situated there eight years ago. From an elderly clerk in a nearby book shop it was learned that one of Jones Brothers' former clerks had a little office on the top floor of the building formerly occupied by the firm. Here he was found in a little attic He had known the Joseph Flynn employed by Jones Brothers, thought that he was now living at Glenside, and knew that he was working for the Multiple Insurance Company. A telephone message to the insurance company brought the Flynn address at Glenside. Less than twenty-four hours later Albert Gough's sister had had her first news of him in sixteen years, during the greater part of which time he had been an inmate of a hospital for the insane in a state in which he had no friends or relatives.

room.

"We have had occasion several times to use the year books of the various religious denominations," writes Miss M. L. Birtwell. "A few years ago we were trying to help a widow with an aged mother and an obstreperous young son dependent upon her. The woman was peculiar; we did not feel that we understood her and she would give little definite information about herself. The old mother was feeble, almost in her second childhood, and much inclined to beg, so not helpful in enabling us to get at the real needs of the family. The woman had a sister, but she declared she did not know her exact name and address. She was married, she said, to a Universalist minister named Taylor, whose Christian name was a Bible name, and she lived 'somewhere in Vermont.' We telephoned a request to the Harvard Divinity Library to consult the Universalist year book. They found an Amos Taylor listed as pastor in the village of K. Mr. Taylor's wife proved to be the sister of the woman we were interested in, and by following up this clue we learned the story of the woman's life, which enabled us to deal with her with a far more sympathetic understanding than had been possible previously."

The case reading for this book brought to light no illustrations

1 In one of the short, unpublished papers referred to in the Preface.

of the use of newspaper files and news indices to establish the date of one event by associating it with another, or to discover the notice of an accident, an arrest, an award, a death, a disappearance, or any of the thousand and one happenings that are recorded in the daily press. Such clues are now made more accessible to the case worker by N. W. Ayer and Son's annual list of all newspapers printed in the United States, by the publication of indices to some of the leading papers, and by Bowker's Index to Dates of Current Events. The latter aims to cover news in the United States which is of permanent interest and has more than a local appeal. The date given is that of the event, not of the report of the event. The index goes back to 1912 only as a separate publication. Indices to the following years and newspapers, which include their personal news, are also available: 1863-1904, New York Times; 18751906, New York Tribune; 1891-1902, Brooklyn Daily Eagle; 1903-1904, 1908-1909, Street's Pandex of the News; 1913 to date, New York Times.1

III. METHOD

"In the early days," says Thayer,2 "they did not stick, it would seem, at showing the jury any document that bore on the case, without even thinking of how the writer knew what he said." This is the first question to ask of ourselves-How did the writer know the truth of what he says? The second is quite as important; namely, What interest, if any, had he at the time that he wrote in representing things as they were not? And the third, Was he trained to be accurate or did his lack of training render inaccuracy probable? These questions for the document in the writing, but its custody since also has a bearing upon our discussion. We may say that there is no record because we do not know how to spell the key words that would identify it, or because it has been misplaced, wrongly indexed, or not indexed at all by its custodians, or because, since it came into their custody, it has been changed or stolen. Public records have been well kept for a long time in some places, in some they have been well kept for a little while only, and in many they are still abominably kept. If

The list is of indices on the shelves of the New York Public Library, omitting those that index no personal news.

* Preliminary Treatise on Evidence, p. 520.

a document is printed, a new element of error creeps in. It is obvious that the mere failure to discover a record after diligent search is negative proof at best and not final. The record, when found, is usually evidence, sometimes proof, but seldom a conclusive demonstration.

"There are three principles which apply to the use of records, whether public or private," says Miss Zilpha D. Smith. "First, to get a general knowledge of what records are available, and, in order to determine their value, of the methods by which they were gathered. Second, to use the earliest record of a certain fact as the most trustworthy. Third, to consult the record when it will serve our purpose instead of seeking an interview, because use of a record does not stir other people to prejudice or action."

Public records in other parts of the country may be consulted through public officials. There is a charge in most states for transcripts, especially certified transcripts, and care must be taken, in writing to mayors, town clerks, clerks of court, chiefs of police, and others, to give all possible identifying information with accuracy and to offer to repay the necessary expenses of the search.2 A search for a record should not be limited to one spelling of names or to one date. The dictionaries used to remind us that, in order to find a word, we must know how to spell it. This is not strictly true, of course, if we are able to think of a number of spellings each of which might possibly be the right one. For foreign proper names, more especially, no small degree of ingenuity is necessary in the searching of records, because the owners of the names do not always know how to spell them, and the custodians and indexers of documents certainly do not. Then too, when an Italian barber named Cellini suddenly changes his name, under influences social or political, to Kelly, the effect upon an index is disastrous. The list of variable spellings given in Appendix III was prepared by the registration clerks of the New York Charity Organization Society from the much more extended groupings in daily use in their Social Service Exchange. Each community should work out its own list, with reference to its local needs.

1 In one of the short, unpublished papers referred to in the Preface. The New York City Bureau of Records, which is under the Department of Health, now assures greater accuracy by issuing photographic copies of its records.