England Directories and Telephone Books - International Institute

Directories
Trade and commercial directories are important sources of personal, commercial, mercantile and political information in a similar fashion to the yellow pages of today. They were produced in both towns and rural areas in Victorian and Edwardian England, and in a few places from the late 17th century.

They are certainly the most accessible sources of community information and are at their best from about 1840 to 1940. After WWII directories tended to be published only for urban areas.

History of Directories
The earliest directories, which were for single cities, are listed in below. The London Directory was taken over by Kent who published a new revision each year until 1771.

Chart: Early Directories

In the late 18th century attempts were made to issue directories covering wider areas, for example William Bailey’s Northern Directory (1781-1787) and John Wilkes The Universal British Directory (1790-1799 in 5 volumes). These were later discontinued as it was found that a detailed local directory was of more value and thus sold better.

Several publishers produced a national series of such local directories, the first being James Pigot from 1814-1853. His business was taken over by Francis Kelly who had started with a London directory in 1799 and had expanded into southern England in 1845. He now had a national series and this became the most popular directory, lasting until 1939.

The series of Post Office Directories started in 1800 but from 1837 were published by Frederick Kelly and his successors. The last directories were published in 1992.

The Universal British Directory covered most large towns in Britain and is not the easiest to use, but contains much information not obtainable elsewhere and is the earliest national one.

Holden’s Annual Directory, from 1816, gives information for 480 towns in Britain. Even more useful for the detail and illustrations that they offer on individual businesses are the dozens of late 19th century Progress, Commerce and kindred publications noted in two articles by Titford (2002).

There were several other publishers, most of whom did not survive very long, exceptions being William White (Hey) and Hutchings and Crowsley’sBuff Books of individual London suburbs from 1861 (Harvey). Other compilers include Andrews, Axon, Banck, Barrett, Drake, Gore, Green, Harrod, Lowndes, Melville, Pike, Robson, Simpson, Slater, Stapleton, Tunnicliff, and Underhill and many others. Coverage varied from one city and its suburbs to one or more counties and bibliographies of directories have been written by Atkins, Norton, and Shaw and Tipper.

Contents Useful for Family History
Everything in them has potential! Early directories were simple alphabetical lists of tradesmen plying each trade, and details of coaches, carriers and postal services. The 19th century publications contained a much greater variety of information and formatting, for example the 1846 Post Office London Directory had Official, Commercial, Court, Parliamentary and Postal sections and a street map. Dennis R. Mills (Rural Community History from Trade Directories), provides valuable sources for understanding rural directories, and recommends the work of Gareth Shaw regarding usage of urban directories.

Chart: 1846 Post Office London Directory Commercial Section (Alphabetical)

Chart: Topographical (Street-by-Street) Directory for Leyton, London (Kelly’s 1894-5)

Chart: Rural Directory for Wilmslow Area Cheshire (Pigot’s 1834)

It is best to consult several different directories as no one company lists all the types of information. There could be descriptions of:


 * History and topography of the settlement.


 * Geology, nature of the soil, chief crops.


 * Chief industries and recent economic developments.


 * Land ownership and tenures.


 * Parish and ward boundaries in relation to street numbers in cities.


 * Arrangement of parishes in pre-1860 rural directories (except Kelly’s) was by the old county subdivisions of hundreds, sokes, wapentakes, lathes and rapes. Descriptions of these divisions were included. After about 1860 there was increasing use of the alphabetical arrangement pioneered by Kelly but the index will still be needed for tiny villages and hamlets.


 * One or more large scale maps or town plans.


 * Illustrations of various kinds.


 * Market and fair days.


 * Transportation facilities, depots or staging posts, and schedules. Your ancestors will have used these in their daily lives.


 * Carriers.
 * Stage coaches, horse-drawn omnibuses, and motor buses from 1920s and 1930s.
 * Train services from 1830s.
 * Vehicles that met trains, usually provided by nearby inns.
 * Postal services and mail coaches, including other services provided by post offices in England: money orders (1850s), savings bank (1870s), telegraph (1880s), telephone (at least 1920s) and payment of old-age pensions (just before WWI).
 * Marine, river and canal vessels, routes, wharves &amp; quays.
 * Emigration agents.
 * Newspaper offices, thus you can find out what was published at certain dates.

There could be lists of all kinds of persons and institutions which had an impact on everyday life:


 * Professionals, business, farmers, tradesmen and craftsmen under their different occupations usually give type of trade and addresses, most useful for finding people in the census, and distinguishing between two of the same name in civil registration. Successful professionals may have had a country residence as well as ‘living over the shop’ in the city. Shaw (quoted by Camp 1999) did a comparison of 1871 census and directory entries and found that 98% of Exeter’s main street households, and 75% of the smaller street ones, appeared in the directory.


 * Principal residents and officials, for example in the court guides of the fashionable districts in London (the first being Boyle’s in 1792), and the gentry and their seats in the country.


 * Some directories are arranged to show the residents street-by-street. This is most useful to compare with a contemporary large scale map to find the nature of your ancestor’s surroundings. Observation of the names of neighbours, employers, ministers and landowners can often resolve the nature of the relationship of a witness on a family document. A topographical directory can also be used as a substitute for a missing nominal census return, at least as far as the head of the family is concerned, confirming where they resided. Similarly such directories are useful before or after available census returns.


 * Administration addresses and names of officers


 * Parliament.
 * County Officials including justices of the peace.
 * Mayors and Aldermen, and later town and rural
 * district councils.
 * Manors.
 * Courts including assizes, quarter and petty
 * sessions venues and dates.
 * Police.
 * Customs and Excise.
 * Agents for land owners, giving an entrée into estate records; also head gardeners, bailiffs and gamekeepers of estates.
 * Registrars of birth, marriage and death.
 * Urban and rural sanitary authorities.


 * Institutions such as hospitals, asylums, workhouses, prisons, schools, and armed forces establishments with addresses and names of officials.


 * Business institutions such as banks and fire insurance offices with addresses and names of officials. Church and chapel addresses and officials, thus you can find out which denominational buildings existed at a given date and who the ministers were. If your relatives can’t be found in the Established Church but they lived opposite the Baptist Chapel, where might their children have gone to Sunday School and their births be noted?


 * Hotels, inns, public houses and some named beer houses.


 * Larger farms.


 * Undertakers and burial grounds.


 * Law offices.


 * Fraternal and political societies or lodges.


 * Library, scientific and agricultural societies.


 * Local employers, employment offices and other businesses.


 * Friendly and Co-operative societies.


 * Charitable institutions and benevolent societies.


 * Lists of principal foreign merchants in Europe.

Then there will be paid advertisements, often with drawings of the businesses themselves or articles for sale (below is a 1857 examples from Billing’s Directory for Devon). Thus one can see that the value of a directory to a family historian is by no means contingent upon an ancestor’s appearing in it! (Thomson).

Chart: Billings Directory for Devon 1857 (From the personal collection of Dr. Penelope Christensen)

Cautions

 * Directories do not list employees such as journeymen, labourers, domestic servants and factory workers, let alone their wives! However, there were far more home-based businesses in former times, each tradesman having his own little workshop-cum-retail outlet.


 * No one directory is comprehensive.


 * The information was slightly out-date (even a year or more), by the time of publication.


 * Dual occupations were common especially in rural areas and these are not always obvious from either census or directories. Only the main one, or that in season when the enumerator visited, may have been given. Commonly a craft was combined with farming; a carpenter and joiner may have made coffins and also acted as undertaker; or a man listed as a carrier may have also sold coal and animal feed. Mills discusses this subject in detail.


 * Do not ignore the former administrative jurisdictions as these frequently determine how the documents were organized, and thus where and how they may be accessed today.

Specialised Directories
A number of 18th century directories of various kinds from the British Library and elsewhere have been digitised by Thomson Gale and were available as a demonstration online in May 2004.

A similar publication, popular from the 17th century onwards, was the annualalmanac—essentially a calendar and mini encyclopaedia. This was a mix of information on markets, fairs, roads, posts, farming advice, historical and scientific knowledge, charities, religious and political commentary, astrological predictions and sensational news (Hey). Local almanacs typically contained some directory-type information as well, particularly the listings of trades, officials and institutions. The Society of Genealogists has a good collection (Newington-Irving) and Frank Hardy has written about their contents in his article, Almanacs in the SoG Library. Genealogists’ Magazine Vol 27 #1, page 18-20. The principal almanacs with their overall date ranges, as given by Hardy, are:


 * Almanach de Gotha (1763-2004) especially for European royal lines.
 * Angliae Notitia (1674-1723).
 * Boyle’s Court Guide (1808-1885).
 * East India Register (1803-1857).
 * Gentlemans and Citizens Almanack (1740-1792).
 * Kelly’s Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes (1880-1968).
 * Magnae Notitia (1737-1755).
 * Royal Kalendar (1769-1886).
 * Treble Almanack (1793-1846).
 * Whitaker’s Almanac (from 1903).

There is also overlap with gazetteers in the treatment of places, institutions and services, (but not individuals).

Telephone Books
Bell patented his telephone in 1876 and Edison in 1877 and the first London telephone directory was published in 1880 but this contained few private subscribers, most of whom would also appear in the court section of the Post Office directory. By the beginning of the Great War (WWI) many upper middle class not in the court section had telephones. There was a great decline in the publishing of traditional directories after WWII and phone books replaced them as an alphabetical finding aid and online indexes are now commonplace.

Archive and Library Holdings
Archives, reference and local history libraries usually carry long runs for their own areas and the bigger repositories have more widespread coverage. They can be contacted by post or email for look-ups. As an example, Bath reference library has an almost continuous line of directories from 1837. In London the Guildhall Library (Harvey), Society of Genealogists (Newington-Irving), and the British Library (catalogue at: The British Library) all have extensive collections.

University libraries have eclectic collections depending on the nature of research conducted there and private donations; holdings of 24 major research universities, as well as the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland, are listed at Copac. Your local Family History Society probably has some print editions and possibly some CD collections. Facsimile Editions

The originals being somewhat rare and pricey there has been a good market for facsimile editions of 19th century directories, for example in the 1990s Winton produced many including:

1830 Pigot’s Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire 1831 Pigot’s Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire 1830 Pigot’s Norfolk and Suffolk 1839 Pigot’s Essex, Herts and Middlesex 1840 Pigot’s Kent, Surrey and Sussex 1841 Pigot’s London and Suburbs

Family History Library Catalogue
Much has been filmed or fiched from major collections such as the Guildhall Library and there are sections in the FHLC PLACE SEARCH for


 * DIRECTORIES
 * DIRECTORIES – BIBLIOGRAPHY
 * DIRECTORIES – HANDBOOKS, MANUALS, ETC
 * DIRECTORIES – INDEXES
 * DIRECTORIES – INVENTORIES, REGISTERS, CATALOGS at the country, county and town levels. In many cases several from the same area have been sensibly arranged on one microfilm.

Electronic Versions
The University of Leicester is creating a digital library of local and trade directories 1750-1920 for England and Wales at Historical Directories. Hundreds are already online and searches can be done by name, address and occupation. They state: "The main considerations in selecting directories for digitisation were to achieve national coverage and also to integrate material from different institutions as a coherent online collection. National coverage has been provided for three date bands: the 1850s, 1890s, and 1910-1920, with one digitised directory from each period selected for each county and main county town." This is a phenomenal resource funded by the National Lottery, the site and all searches and document downloads are free. They don’t have everything, though, and others can be found at other sites such as:


 * Sue O’Neill’s searchable Trade Directory Index which covers several Pigot’s directories for 1830 and Slater’s directory of Co Durham for 1854.
 * Direct Resources has provided surname indexes to trade directories of 40 counties around 1848.

Huge collections are available online from ArchiveCD books at Rod Neep, including the Universal Directory 1791.

Finding Telephone Books
British Telecom Museum holds an almost complete collection but sadly closed to the public in 1997. Similarly there used to be a Historical Telephone Directory Library in London, but this seems to exist no longer. Wouldn’t it be nice if they digitized the lot and put them online!

Other collections are available at Guildhall Library, London and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Family History Library has a few telephone books from many countries and some have been filmed.

Local history libraries and archives should be consulted for their holdings. David and Charles have reprinted some early Victorian phone directories (1884-5) and these can be found in libraries or at auction (some were found recently at: John Townsend).

Tracking Families
Consultation of a long run of directories is preferable as it is then possible to ascertain when a business started, its address and any name changes over the years, removal to another location and its disappearance. When the name of the proprietor is first given then one can follow up with records of his training or freedom of the city, and on disappearance of the name look for emigration or death and probate. When a business changes its name, it is wise to investigate whether this is because a widow remarried, or it has been inherited by a son-in-law.

Searching a series of directories is particularly useful for dating photographs having a studio address, because studios may not have stayed in business very long at any one location.

The study of a series of directories can help us better understand our ancestors’ lives as we recognize the urban changes, industrial developments, population movements, appearance and disappearance of congregations and so forth that would have had a profound impact on them (Thomson).

The items shown in the charts below show the value of finding as many as possible of these old directories plus subscription lists, alumni lists etc. in order to follow the family. West’s Village Records, dealing with Chaddesley Corbett in Worcestershire, is a superb affirmation of this principle.

On a related topic, if you have the name of a country house but don’t know where it is located try consulting a contemporary gazetteer (your FamilySsearch Center should have at least Lewis 1831, Wilson 1870 and Bartholomew 1952 on fiches) or Webb’s Index of English Country Houses.

Chart: Jupp Family in 18th Century London Directories 

Chart: Topping Family in 18th Century London Directories

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