Browse Greece City Directories

Greece City Directory Holdings

Rochester Public Library Local History & Genealogy is the principal shelf for Greece directory research. Its suburban directory collection begins with original bound volumes from 1930, while a separate Rochester city-directory collection reaches back to 1827. The collections overlap geographically but are not interchangeable: a Greece household can appear under a suburban town heading, a Rochester post-office label, or a rural route. Begin with the collection that best fits the directory year and the address wording you have.

The library describes later suburban holdings as 1930-present, but the exact Greece coverage for every later volume was not verified. It is also not safe to assume that every city-directory year gives Greece its own town section. Check the title page, town heading, and street address before treating a result as a Town of Greece record.

Greece Suburban Directory Years

The Rochester Public Library suburban-directory collection digitizes the 1930 through 1940 sequence. The early 1930-34 volumes cover Brighton, Gates, Greece, and Irondequoit. Pittsford joins in 1935, East Rochester in 1936, Fairport in 1937, and Webster in 1938. Those expanding town lists explain why a volume is not simply a directory for Greece alone.

For Greece, the library directly links individual PDFs for 1930, 1931, 1939, and 1940. Treat each volume as a dated snapshot. An entry can show a person at a road in that compiler's coverage year, but it cannot establish an exact arrival or departure day. A missing name may reflect an omission, a child or other unlisted person, no fixed address, a different spelling, or a residence outside that year’s coverage.

Sampson & Murdock's Greece Directories

The 1930 introduction identifies Sampson & Murdock Co. at 730 Powers Building in Rochester, a publisher established in 1846. Its suburban format has more than one path into the same household. The white Alphabetical Section organizes names for each town. A Business Directory and Reference Department provide additional context. The blue House and Street Directory reverses the route, arranging complete streets, intersection numbers, and people or businesses in numerical street order.

The alphabetical section records names, occupations, and addresses for people over 20, along with business and post-office addresses. The street section is especially valuable after a name search succeeds because it places an entry beside nearby numbered addresses. It is still a compiled directory, not a census or title record. Use the directory's own abbreviation key before expanding shorthand from memory.

Reading a Greece City Directory Entry

A 1931 Greece entry normally begins with the surname and given name or initials. A spouse may appear in parentheses, and an occupation can follow before the residence. The address may end with a post-office label rather than the modern municipal wording. For example, the verified 1931 volume includes a North Greece road entry for Gardner Henry with Nettie and an occupation, and a Lakewood Drive entry for Gauthier Edmond J with Clara. Those examples show the structure, not proof of a continuing relationship or present address.

Criss-cross directory

A reverse directory arranged by street and number rather than alphabetically by name. In this collection, the house-and-street section serves that function.

Householder index

A name list centered on the person or household identified by the directory compiler, not a full list of every person at an address.

Abbreviation key

The volume's explanation of its shorthand. Read or photograph it first so that residence, relationship, and business abbreviations are not guessed.

Greece Directory Street Sections in 1939

By 1939, the introduction identifies R.L. Polk & Co. at 729 Powers Building. Its pink House and Street Directory again gives a street-order route into the material. It can help locate a former household near a known intersection, compare adjacent listed addresses, and connect a name-section entry to a physical place. The 1940 Greece name section reports 6,435 names, 99 more than the 6,336 reported for 1939, with 199 names marked with a death date or removed.

Directory notation is a lead, not title proof. The Polk house-and-street section identifies resident property owners with a symbol, but its own notice says canvasser information is not legal proof of ownership. A mark is a reason to check a Monroe County deed or assessment roll, not a reason to state that a person held legal title. The same caution applies when a boarder or a nonlisted family member is absent from a page.

Place Labels in Greece Directories

Historical directory language follows postal and local geography, not a single modern label. Entries may say Rochester, North Greece, Hilton, or a rural-delivery route. Rochester on a line can be a post-office reference rather than evidence that the home stood inside the City of Rochester. North Greece and other hamlet names can likewise identify a local area without matching a present ZIP code.

Search a surname with initials, spouse names, and alternate spellings. Then repeat the search using the road, a nearby intersection, or an earlier and later volume. The Town of Greece was established in 1822 after the Northampton and Gates period, and Charlotte was annexed to Rochester in 1916. Those boundaries and names make a broader Rochester-area search appropriate when an older Greece result seems to disappear.

Finding Greece Directory PDFs and Staff

The digitized suburban volumes are text-searchable. Acrobat Edit > Find is a fast first pass for a distinctive surname, a road, or a spouse name, and the library FAQ notes that the name and other sections are alphabetic with bookmarks. Search an exact term, then try initials and abbreviated roads. The PDFs are easier to search than a scan-only volume, but a failed Find result is not conclusive because the name may be absent or indexed differently.

For material outside the digitized run, use Rochester Public Library Local History & Genealogy. Greece Public Library, at 2 Vince Tofany Blvd., provides in-library Ancestry Library Edition for census, land and tax, immigration, military, voting-list, and other historical collections. Town Historian Keith C. Suhr works through the library on Fridays from 1 to 3 p.m. or by appointment. Local-history staff can help identify the proper volume, microfilm, newspaper index, plat, or survey instead of treating a PDF search as the whole collection.

Tracing a Greece Directory Household

Use a cross-year method when reconstructing a household. It keeps a single directory line from carrying more weight than it can support.

1. Start with the exact name, initials, spouse name, road, or post-office label in one Greece volume.
2. Check the same name in the prior and next directory years, recording the address, occupation, and any change in spelling or household clue.
3. Open the house-and-street section for each address and note nearby entries without assuming that every neighbor was related.
4. Pair the dated directory snapshots with the public 1950 federal census, then compare household composition, ages, birthplace, and address geography.
5. Use Monroe County deeds for the ownership trail and Greece Historical Society or RPL newspapers for moves, deaths, anniversaries, or community references.

Directories identify residents, while deeds follow recorded ownership. A household may move without a deed, and an owner can live elsewhere. For a present-day parcel or street-by-street follow-up, use the Greece address directory rather than trying to make an historical street section answer a current question.

Greece Directory Context Beyond Names

The Greece Historical Society research collection points researchers to The Greece Press, Greater Greece Press, The Greece Post, Hilton Record, historic photographs, newsletters, programs, and local archive projects. These sources can explain a road, business, event, school, farm, or family name that appears with little detail in a directory. The Society museum is at 595 Long Pond Rd. and also accepts research contacts by appointment.

The Historical Society's research page is the source for the local archive route shown below.

The research page supplements a directory search with newspapers, photographs, programs, and local projects. Greece Images adds a public searchable image database with categories for people, houses and farms, roads and maps, schools, businesses, and community groups. Captions can supply a useful lead, but verify a name or address against a directory, deed, newspaper, or vital source.

Greece Directory Timeline

• 1827: Rochester city directories begin; the library reports digitized city volumes through 1946 and physical holdings to the present.
• 1892-1920: Separate street and house-directory supplements support older address work.
• 1922: Rochester name and street material is combined in the city-directory run.
• 1930: The Greece suburban sequence begins under Sampson & Murdock, with an original bound run beginning that year.
• 1939-1940: R.L. Polk volumes use the later house-and-street format; the 1940 name count documents the scale of the Greece section.

No official source reviewed established the last printed year for either directory series. That is a collection question for the research desk, not a date to infer from the last PDF. The useful transition is clear: rural-route and hamlet wording led into street-numbered suburban volumes, then digital PDFs and library databases made portions of the historical shelf searchable from home.