PODs » Addressing History

New POD browsing page on the NLS website

Jan 212011

A quick update that we think will make for some fun weekend browsing.

AddressingHistory project partners the National Library of Scotland have recently added a new page to their website allowing you to browse the Post Office Directories that have already been scanned and made available online. Each directory is listed and the number of directories available is shown in brackets after the town or city name. This can be found at: http://www.nls.uk/family-history/directories/post-office and the page looks like this:

A screen shot of the NLS Scottish Post Officer Directories page: http://www.nls.uk/family-history/directories/post-office

Clicking through to a directory lets you either look at the PDF file or browse the directories in an online viewer at the Internet Archive – I decided to have a look at the Glasgow directory and rather liked the “names too late for insertion” section:

The new Scottish Post Office Directories page is a really useful way to browse the collection, and the directories are always huge fun to read through, so we know you will be pleased to see that so many Scottish directories can now be viewed from there for free.

On a related note: currently only three Edinburgh directories that appear in the AddressingHistory search and mapping tool so you may also be pleased to hear that we are currently looking at several possible developments to AddressingHistory including the possibility of broadening coverage to another or several other areas of Scotland. If there are areas you think would be particularly useful we’d love to hear your comments below.

Have a fantastic weekend and do let the National Library of Scotland know your thoughts on their new directories page!

Guest Blog Post: Celia Heritage on Using Maps for Family History Research

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Jan 062011

To mark the start of the new year we are delighted to bring you a guest post by Celia Heritage. Celia is a professional genealogist and lecturer in Family History and, yes, her surname really is Heritage. Celia offers professional research service, online research advice and Family History Courses. She is currently working on putting her popular 5-week beginners’ and refreshers’ course “Building Your Family Tree” online and has several talks on using maps in family history coming up in her talk schedule over the next few months.

Using Maps for Family History Research

As family historians we often become set in our ways in the types of records we study. Records of birth and marriage tell us about our ancestors in relationship to other people, while census records provide us with a glimpse into the lives of our families once every ten years, showing us where they lived and what they did for a living. If you hope to really get to know your ancestors however, it’s time you turned to other sources and two of the sources we regularly underuse are maps and directories. We are very lucky to live in the world of digitisation! Digitisation has revolutionised family history, taking records that were previously only available in isolation on the bookshelf and, not only making them accessible at home via the Internet, but evolving them in order to achieve a far greater depth of meaning.

Whereas maps tell us what sort of environment our ancestors lived in, giving an indication of local facilities from railway stations, public houses, factories and public baths, directories give us specific information about the people who actually lived in that environment: where they lived and often their occupation. Directories are excellent sources for fleshing out your family tree. I traced two of my own relatives Joseph Hemus and his wife Martha in the post office and trade directories for Birmingham between 1880 and the 1920s. From the directories I discovered that although Joseph ran a draper and hosiery business, his wife had her own business as the proprietor of a domestic service agency, initially from the same address as her husband and later at a separate address. The directories also showed that Joseph and Martha had originally lived in and run his draper’s business from one premises but, presumably as his business prospered, he was able to rent separate premises for the business a few streets away from the family home. In his later years a study of the directories once again shows that he moved the business back home and guess he must have downsized the business in his later years.

The beauty of the AddressingHistory project is that it marries these two concepts, producing as it does the results of a surname search in the directories plotted on a map of the environment in which they lived. This means that not only is it easy to pinpoint exactly which part of the city an ancestor lived in at that time, but that you can simultaneously locate other family members with the same surname living in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh directory of 1784 predates the first national census that was of any use by some 57 years while both the 1865 and 1905 directories are useful stop gaps in between the decennial census returns. And while we are here – the other great thing about this project is that with the selection of three maps many years apart it makes a superb tool for watching the city of Edinburgh develop through the years before your very eyes!

Guest Blog Post: Using Australian Post Office Directories to Trace Ancestors

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Oct 272010

As we prepare for the AddressingHistory launch we are delighted to welcome another guest blogger to the AddressingHistory blog.

Shauna Hicks has been tracing her own family history since 1977 and holds a Diploma in Family Historical Studies from the Society of Australian Genealogists. Having worked in government for over 35 years, primarily in libraries and archives in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne, Shauna is currently Director of Shauna Hicks History Enterprises and regularly blogs about genealogy news, events and experiences.

Shauna is a collaborative partner in Unlock The Past a new venture promoting history, genealogy and heritage in Australia and New Zealand. She is a Fellow of the Queensland Family History Society; a recipient of the Australian Society of Archivists Distinguished Achievement Award and in 2009 received the AFFHO Services to Family History Award.

Shauna has written a piece for us on the usefulness of Post Office Directories in her own family history research.

Using Australian Post Office Directories to Trace Ancestors

Post office directories (PODs) have similar contents regardless of where in the world they were published. In Australia due to our smaller population in the 19^th century, PODs tend to list most people (usually the head of the family) who were resident in a given area. Even miners can be found if they stayed long enough in an area to make it on the annual POD. While there are State based directories, there are also individual ones for capital cities and for regional areas. There were numerous publishers over the years but well known names include Sands and Wise.

An example from my own family history will highlight both the usefulness and the potential traps of using directories for family history research. All information should be confirmed by at least two different sources.

The 1898 Wise Directory for Queensland lists my Scottish gg grandfather John Carnegie as a selector living at Toorbul, 41 miles north of Brisbane. Listed as a selector indicates that he had land and a land search revealed he selected two farming areas. John’s daughter Clara married Charles Davis and a Charles Davies is listed as a selector living at Toorbul. Researchers need to be flexible with spelling as in this instance Davies is in fact Davis.

The 1909 Wise Directory still has John living at Toorbul but he died in 1903 so researchers need to be aware that directories may not be totally accurate but provide clues to be followed up. Similarly a Chas Davies is still listed at Toorbul and illustrates how given names may be abbreviated and taken into account when searching. Charles disappeared in the Western Australian goldfields ca 1895 so he wasn’t there in either 1898 or 1909 but had been living there prior to going to WA in 1893.

The majority of Australian PODs have been digitised by Archive Digital Books Australasia and are available for individual sale. They are also in the collections of FindMyPast.com.au and Ancestry.com.au. Western Australian PODs are searchable online 1893-1949 for free at the State Library of WA. A useful article by Graham Jaunay on Directories and Almanacs is available online and in my article Find Your Ancestors in Church Publications Part 2 I used directories to find out what churches existed in places my ancestors lived.

Over the years I have found Australian PODs extremely useful in my research and with digitised copies and online access it is easier than ever to use directories. I already know that John Carnegie’s wife Helen Stratton was the daughter of Charles Straton listed in the 1842 Oliver & Boyd’s New Edinburgh Almanac and National Repository as a writer in Montrose. The Stratton family moved to Edinburgh and lived there between 1847 and 1859. I am really excited and looking forward to accessing Edinburgh directories online and finding out new information on my families.