STREET DIRECTORIES

Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Search
  3. Search Hints & Tips
  4. Data Amendments
     
  5. Site Map
  6. Access Keys
     
  7. Contact Us
  8. PRONI Home

INTRODUCTION

The street directories featured on this website consist of original volumes held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) covering the years 1819 to 1900. PRONI does not have copies of all the street directories that were published before 1852 and even when the main run of the "Belfast and Ulster Street Directory" commences in 1852 there are gaps in the series up to 1900. These volumes which were on open access in the Public Search Room in PRONI are very heavily used while the paper in some of the volumes is very fragile. They were therefore at risk to the extent that pages or parts of pages have already been lost or damaged and any further handling would seriously endanger their long term preservation. It was therefore decided to have them scanned and at the same time to provide a search facility which will enable users to find key words in a section of a directory, in a particular directory or in any of the directories.

LIST OF DIRECTORIES SCANNED

  • Bradhaw's General and Commercial Directory for 1819
  • Belfast Directory 1831-32
  • Matier's Belfast Directory 1835-36
  • Martin's Belfast Directory 1839
  • New Directory of the City of Londonderry and Coleraine, including Strabane with Lifford, Newtownlimavady, Portstewart and Portrush
  • The New Commercial Directory of Armagh, Newry, Londonderry, Drogheda, Dundalk, Monaghan, Omagh, Strabane, Dungannon, Lisburn, Lurgan, Portadown and neighbouring towns
  • Martin's Belfast Directory 1842-43
  • Henderson's New Belfast and Northern Repository 1843-44
  • Henderson's Belfast Directory and Northern Repository 1846-47
  • Henderson's Belfast Directory and Northern Repository 1850
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1852
  • Henderson's Belfast Directory and Northern Repository 1852
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1858-59 Volume 4
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1863-64 Volume 6
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1866
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1870
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1877
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1880
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1884
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1887
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1890 Volume 13
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1892
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1895 Volume 16
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1896
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1897
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1899 Volume 20
  • The Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory 1900

EARLY APPEARANCE

Street directories for Ulster only begin to appear in the early 19th century. They were published for trade and business purposes, largely as a result of the growth in trade at home and with the wider world. Hence the emphasis on the listing of manufacturers, traders and merchants as illustrated by the title of Thomas Bradshaw's 1820 Directory, the earliest of the directories to feature on this website - it is described as "...General and Commercial Directory" and includes a list of English, Scottish and Irish bankers.

CONTENT

Some of the directories only feature Belfast, for example, the 1831-2 Directory and Matier's 1835-6 Directory, but will generally also include a list of the gentry in the neighbourhood. However, most directories will have details for Belfast and for the principal towns and villages in Ulster. Occasionally the street directory is only for some provincial towns, for example, the 1840 New Commercial Directory of Armagh, Newry, Londonderry etc. The work of compiling the directories was complex and time consuming as a consequence, for example, of people moving and changing their addresses, and of the re-numbering of streets and the re-naming of streets in Belfast resulting from the huge growth of Belfast which was one of the fastest growing cities in Europe in the late 19th century. Often the information was out of date by the time the directory was published although the publishers did make an effort to include additions and removals in the directory if received at a late stage in the publication.
They generally follow a similar layout and the website enables you to limit your search to particular sections of a directory:
Belfast will feature at the beginning of each directory and will begin with an historical description and statistics of the borough followed by a very comprehensive listing of, for example, public boards and government offices, charitable and benevolent institutions, educational establishments, literary and scientific societies, and religious missions, societies and churches.
This will be followed by an alphabetical listing of the principal inhabitants, merchants, shopkeepers etc, and their addresses a listing of same by street, and a listing of persons by profession and trade and their addresses.
Very often there will also be a village directory which will give a list of the principal inhabitants living in the outskirts of Belfast and arranged by village, for example, Dunmurry, Jordanstown and Newtownbreda as well as an alphabetical listing referred to as "Country Residents".
The provincial section of the directories usually has a counties section giving a description of the county - for example, trade, population, administrative divisions, and principal institutions and office holders. This is followed by the provincial towns section, each town having an introduction giving a history and description of the town and listing the institutions and office holders. Institutions that feature regularly are churches, schools, courts, the constabulary, post offices, infirmaries and asylums, prisons and workhouses. For each town there will then follow a list of the nobility and gentry, the clergy and professional people, and traders and merchants with their addresses. There is no street listing for the provincial towns and not everyone who lived in the town or village will be listed.
Almost all the directories include advertisements for goods, services and commercial activities either at the beginning or end of the directories and also throughout the volumes. Advertisements were one way of paying for the costs of producing the directories.

THE VALUE OF STREET DIRECTORIES

Street directories are of obvious value for family history research, containing as they do, thousands of names but it must be remembered that they do not include small tenant farmers, labourers or servants and will only include a very small number of people who lived in the provincial towns. Until the 1901 and 1911 census returns are available on-line, street directories are one means of identifying where many families lived in Belfast - if you are to have any success in locating a family in the 1901 and 1911 census returns you need to identify the street where the family lived. The search facility on this website will enhance access for the family historian providing a facility to search for a surname wherever it occurs in a directory or in all the directories.
Street directories are also an invaluable source of information for the local historian. Both the introductions with the lists of institutions and officers and the lists of inhabitants, traders, merchants etc provide an insight into the history and development of Belfast and the provincial towns, their industrial and commercial growth or decline and the social fabric of the different localities. This information can be used to add further detail to original archive material such as the Valuation books and maps. Very useful pieces of work have been done to map the information in the street directories with the valuation details using the large scale valuation maps to build up a detailed picture of life in a country town over a period of time. The occupations listed in the street directories are clues to the type of industry and commercial activities that were operating in Belfast and the provincial towns and to the growing industrialisation of the country.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the Linen Hall Library and to Belfast Central Library for the provision of copies of damaged pages of the street directories and for the loan of one particular directory as PRONI's copy was in a poor physical state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Draft "Guide to Belfast and Ulster Street Directories 1805-1914" to be published in 2006 by the Local History Panel of the Library and Information Services Council, Northern Ireland.