Researching Your Leadville House

We have Leadville city directories from 1879-1918 (no city directories were done in 1893 or 1896). The city directories list residents (head of household) in alphabetical order with residence and often place of employment. Women usually are not listed unless they were widowed or owned a business.

Looking for beyond 1918?
From 1919 to current we have phone books that are currently not accessible to researchers due to the closure of the Leadville Room. The phone books from 1919-1955 are poor photocopies, and there are some pages missing, but they can still be useful. If you need any research done in the phone books, please send your request to aj@lakecountypubliclibrary.org.

The city directories are available as downloadable PDF files using this link. Each PDF will need to be searched individually. Once you have opened one of the PDFs, you can perform a search using Control+F on your keyboard, or go to Edit>Find. In the little search box you can type the address in, and it will bring up results if it can find them. Sometimes the optical recognition has issues and won't return any results, which means going through line by line and page by page to see if you can locate the address visually.

Sometimes searching the house number (for example, 318) and using the next/previous buttons to go through the results can help you find the address if optical recognition doesn't return results. If you type a name in and no results turn up, you can scroll through the document or use the bookmarks to go to the letter you need (at this time most but not all have bookmarks).

Searching for the 318 W. 4th address in the Leadville City Directories provided an overwhelming amount of results. The earliest entry was in 1882, and the last was in 1918. Below is the list of names found in the city directories. If you would like to look at the corresponding city directory pages, it can be downloaded as a PDF document here.

Residents of 318 W. 4th

1882-1885 - C. H. Livingston(e) (sometimes spelled Livingston, sometimes Livingstone)

1886 - Ernest E. Goodell

1887 - Clarence Hersey

1888 - didn't find any entries with search function

1889 - Charles Denison

1890 - Samuel Wilson

1891 - George Hewitt

1892 - Miss Mary Sexton

1893 - no city directories were made this year

1894- 1895 - Andrew H. Sebring and Rhodes Davis

1896 - no city directories were made this year

1897 - Alfred C. Davis

1898 - didn't find any entries with search function

1899-1902 - Michael Schneider

1903 - Philip Urban

1904 - Ed W. Fryer

1905 - William H. Lyons and James E. Phelan

1906 - Michael Schneider

1907 - George Thompson

1908 - Walter P. Rodd

1909 - Sam Minowitz

1910 - didn't find any entries with search function

1911 - J. Mark Kellerup

1912 - Harry S. Alexander, James R. and Thomas H. Hagadorn

1913-1918 - Jeremiah J. Dooley

• Each PDF file of the Leadville city directories will need to be searched individually
• It helps if you look at one of the first pages of the directory to see how addresses are listed (318 w 4th, 318 W 4th) and then search using the same format
• The optical recognition in these files is not perfect - sometimes names and addresses can be missed
• When you find a name in one directory, try looking up the same name in the next directory before you address search, just in case the same person/family lived there several years
• Keep a list of who you find in the city directories - you can search names in the newspapers and might find more information!
• If you come across an abbreviation that you aren't sure what it means, look in the front of the city directory for the list of abbreviations