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Historic Houston City Directories


sevfiv

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I haven't had much trouble looking at these directories, it gets stuck in the middle of trying to access sometimes, I just restart, and it appears. Maybe it's because I'm just opening, and not saving.

This info. is great, I was able to look up my great-grandfather and his employer from the 1920's.

I love those ads.

Edited by NenaE
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what is this?

Big thick books that list every resident of Houston for the years covered by the directory. There are also advertisements from businesses, and a list of residents by address. Great tool for history research, genealogy, etc. A predecessor to the phone book.

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  • 3 months later...

Hmmm. Seems like it's trying to install a Windows .exe file (maybe an inline reader plug-in?) on my computer when I click on the file, when that fails it downloads the 48 MB file to my hard drive. <_< Viewing it in Preview has too poor of resolution to be readable.

Edited by marmer
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I am sure having a tough time with the 1942 directory.

The (small) names are sure hard to read. I didn't have the problem with the previous files.

Edited by gnu
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I am sure having a tough time with the 1942 directory.

The (small) names are sure hard to read. I didn't have the problem with the previous files.

I realize that the library is probably trying to keep the file sizes down, but the directories should have been scanned at a higher resolution. I looked through the 1939-1942 directories, and was disappointed to find many of the names and addresses are illegible.

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I just looked through the first part of 1942 and yeah - same complaint (though nothing tried to install a file like marmer described)..

I *think* a third party did the scanning but they were all from the microform copies so if the microform was bad, there's no fix..

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Which year did you try to download? What was the file name(s)?

Sev, I tried the first file in the series. The file name is enormously descriptive: "187.pdf."

Tried it twice, both times it goes to a download link. That actually makes sense for them, I guess, maybe saves them some bandwidth.

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Can you right-click on the "Access this item. (48.12 MB)" link and choose "save link as?"

When I left-click on the access link, however, a save/open option opens for me anyhow..

Sev, both things you describe sound like a download. I'd like to view it in the browser without downloading a 48 MB file to my hard drive every time. I did try the right-click option "Open Link in New Tab" but that just opens a blank tab, and (surprise!) starts another download.

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If you use Firefox you can go to Tools --> Options --> Applications - there should be a few Adobe Acrobat/Readers in the list. You can set how you want Firefox to handle opening PDFs - either ask each time, prompt to save file, open in Acrobat/Reader (externally), or open in Firefox (need the Firefox plugin...would prompt you to get it if you don't have it already).

I think the 48MB will still be kept in your browser's temp folder but you can manually clear that out..

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I actually have the newest version of Safari and Adobe Reader configured to default to browser viewing. I'm pretty sure that the HPL link forces a download, probably to save them bandwidth from casual online viewers like me. But I don't know enough about html to be able to tell by looking at the source code.

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