The charities that developed in the major cities of the industrialized world throughout the nineteenth century and beyond are no longer considered as anecdotal by historiography. Charitable practices consolidated or redistributed the relationships between political forces, redefined the internal hierarchies of the privileged classes, were intended to stabilize social order and control urban working classes, were matrices for the reformist public policies that came to prevail later, and created a space where middle-class women could have access to public action. However, aside from biographies of certain leading figures or descriptions of institutions, there exists no sociography of charitable worlds. We have worked on a project aiming to produce a sociography of charities for several major cities around 1900, and have used as source material charity directories issued by " charity organizers " who intended to render charitable practices more " scientific " in their respective cities.