Trade and Street Directories

About a year ago, I blogged about street directories produced both by the Post Office and their availability online at the National Library of Scotland and as maps at AddressingHistory. 

Trade and street directories are useful in confirming information found in the census or as an alternative to valuation rolls.

My recommendation in our Kith and Kin columns in the Border Telegraph and Peeblesshire News newspapers was a collection of freely downloadable Scottish directories , however there’s an easier source on the National Library’s page of Post Office directories, (for Borders localities, choose Scotland).

I’ve now discovered another useful website that contains local and trade directories for England and Wales between 1750 to 1919. You can search by decade (1850s to 1910s), by location or by keywords (a combination of location, decade, and other details) and the directories are free to read and print, however you can print only one page at a time.

Visualising Urban Geography Workshop at National Library of Scotland

Poor Relief Recipients (with identifiable Edinburgh addresses) from Jedburgh and Melrose parishes Poor Law Records volumes 1852-1930

At the AddressingHistory Launch Event, Professor Richard Rodger mentioned a workshop on 6th December at the Maps Reading Room, National Library of Scotland, to explore their new web-based resources, based on the work they've done for Edinburgh; and in spite of the snowy conditions, I attended this. Although they advertised the workshop for a general audience, it contained a lot of discussion about the technologies involved in the website, as well as a hands-on opportunity to show a set of data on a map.

Chris Fleet began by showing us a variety of maps, prospect views, plans, aerial photos, and digital maps of Edinburgh, all part of the 20,000 items digitised over the last 15 years. Key to this is their collection of geo-referenced maps, maps that can be perfectly positioned in relation to another map by using lots of co-ordinates, and it’s these maps that allow data about locations of people and objects to be combined with maps. Chris demonstrated how new geo-referenced maps could be produced using free technology and said he would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in volunteering to produce new maps.

Professor Richard Rodger then demonstrated the Visualising Urban Geography project with some exciting tools bringing together sets of historical geo-referenced maps, social and demographic information to analyse and present data in more detail than at the AddressingHistory launch in November. He showed Edinburgh as a collection of registration districts, the growth of Edinburgh since medieval times, as a comparison of sanitary districts and property rents, as a comparison of advocates and solicitors homes over time, the occupations of Edinburgh’s colony residents and discussed the historical reasons for the changes we saw on the maps.
He showed too, how they could accurately measure distances and areas of land, which could be useful to a lot of professions.

Stuart Nicol discussed the technologies involved which was rather complicated, and I think most of us were glad that this was followed by a coffee break.

After the break we had a go at using one of their tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), to plot a set of trades-people on a map of Edinburgh, using spreadsheet sets of data that Professor Rodger’s team had extracted from a 1911 post office directory. There were coal merchants, cycle repairers, dairymen, egg-producers, and many other trades. Using their instructions, I managed to plot the egg- producers, who surprisingly were concentrated in northeast Edinburgh and on the road to Leith. Professor Rodger explained that often it’s difficult to guess, when looking at a mass of data, what plotting locations on a map will show, but the resulting map often presents new insights.

Since the workshop I’ve used the data from our publications of Poor Law Records for Melrose and Jedburgh to plot recipients of poor relief (see the yellow circles), who lived in Edinburgh, and that's in the picture. I'd like to be able to show this as an interactive web page, and a future intention is to show recipients in Jedburgh on a map, and those recipients that lived in the bit of Galashiels that was in Melrose parish on a map of Galashiels.

AddressingHistory Launch Event Videos

On 17th November, I blogged about the AddressingHistory launch event at the National Library of Scotland. The videos of the event can now be accessed on the AddressingHistory channel of YouTube. This comprises the talks given by Peter Burnhill, Stuart Macdonald, Professor Robert Morris, Cate Newton, Nicola Osborne and Professor Richard Rodger.

AddressingHistory Launch Event, Edinburgh - 17th November

I attended this event today at the National Library of Scotland. There were 30-40 other people there, some professional genealogists, some staff, some from heritage organisations interested in using data, some from family history organisations, some social historians, and other individuals.

For me it was an exciting and interesting afternoon and gave me lots of ideas for ways that we might be able to analyse poor law data, wages, allowances paid, and the 19th century police and criminal records data being researched.

I hadn't realised that the National Library of Scotland has been digitising documents for over 10 years, and Cate Newton (Director of Collections and Research) mentioned some digitised collections that I think it would be interesting to explore further.

Professor Robert Morris introduced the AddressingHistory project and made the point that the website although launched today is very much a beta site - there is a lot of work to be done in cleaning and correcting data, and conducting testing. He pointed out that the Post Office directories have varied data structures, however that's not fully reflected in the website data. He estimated that a lot of the directory entries have not been converted into the correct text, which is a very common problem when using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and is a reason why searches may fail. Result listings are generated from a Google search of the address field, which may contain both a business address and a private address, or have some other aspect to it containing the search term.

Stuart Macdonald (AddressingHistory Project Manager, EDINA) told us about the management of the projects and that registered users of the site will have the opportunity to do crowd-sourcing.

Nicola Osborne (AddressingHistory Project Officer & Social Media Officer, EDINA) showed some guest blogs with ideas, and she wants suggestions for content and invites guest blogs. She asked us to tweet to #AHLaunch, and link to their Facebook page.

Professor Richard Rodger demonstrated the Visualising Urban Geography project with some exciting tools to analyse and present data.

Dr Helen Chisholm (EDINA) talked about the Statistical Accounts of Scotland – there are 28,000 digitised pages. There's both a free version (photos of the pages) and a paid for version whereby you can search for and download text. She invited us to put our favourite bits on their Facebook page.

Chris Fleet (Senior Map Curator, NLS) talked about Digitised Historic Mapping – and all the different ways that that data could be used.

Kenny Beaton (School Of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh) informed us about a newish website to be launched in December, which contains 50,000 audio tracks of prose, verse, and song, some in Gaelic and some in Scots.
The site is called both Tobar An Dualchais and Kist O' Riches.

Ines Mayfarth talked about the Internet Archive digitisation project to digitise Post Office directories; originally entirely separate from AddressingHistory. In contrast to my previous blog on AddressingHistory, 750 (not 400) Post Office directories have been digitised between the 1770s and 1911. The first 3 letters of surnames in the directories are in the process of being indexed and that is likely to be available in Autumn 2011.
Ines reminded us that the Post Office directories also contained other interesting information, timetables, ferry schedules, ads, as well as lots of other information.

Peter Burnhill (Director, EDINA) summarised the afternoon and we adjourned for drinks, nibbles and networking.

The whole proceedings were being videoed and presumably those videos will be online soon.

AddressingHistory - Finding Individuals and Professionals in Post Office Directories on Maps

I'm not often so impressed.

The beta search site from AddressingHistory, a partnership between EDINA and the National Library of Scotland using materials already digitised, is an online tool aimed at a broad range of users, both within and outwith academia (particularly local history groups and genealogists), to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office directories with contemporaneous historical maps.

The project will focus on three eras of Edinburgh mapping and Post Office directories (1784-5, 1865, 1905-6) however the technologies demonstrated will eventually include the National Library of Scotland's full collection of digitised materials including 400 directories and associated maps covering the whole of Scotland.

The online tool currently allows you to search by surname, place or profession within a specific Scottish Post Office directory for Edinburgh and Leith. You can choose whether to have overlays of maps by Alexander Kincaid, 1784; Bartholomew Post Office Plan, 1865; Johnston Post Office Plan, 1905.

In this example, I searched for doctors for the 1865 directory and got this great image,

which I can move around, zoom into and out of. The map is followed by a listing of the search results (in this case, 116 doctors), and there's a blue kite-shaped pin for each result. Hovering over a pin shows the name of the associated individual. I can click on an individual result and see the corresponding page from the Post Office directory. Most of the doctors are in and around the New Town area, with a few around the University of Edinburgh, and on the road down to Leith, and that's surprising; I expected that the doctors would have been dispersed over a wider area.

Try the AddressingHistory site yourself.

There's a launch event in Edinburgh on Wednesday 17th November with a packed half day of talks and demonstrations at the National Library of Scotland (NLS):

Programme
• Welcome – Cate Newton (Director of Collections and Research, NLS)
• Introduction – Professor Robert Morris (Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History , University of Edinburgh)
• AddressingHistory presentation and launch – Stuart Macdonald (AddressingHistory Project Manager, EDINA) & Nicola Osborne (AddressingHistory Project Officer & Social Media Officer, EDINA))
• Visualising Urban Geography project – Professor Richard Rodger (Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Edinburgh)
• Statistical Accounts of Scotland – Dr Helen Chisholm (EDINA)
• NLS Digitised Historic Mapping – Chris Fleet (Senior Map Curator, NLS)
• Tobar An Dualchais – Kenny Beaton (School Of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh)
• Internet Archive digitisation project(s) – Lee Hibberd /Ines Mayfarth (NLS)
• Wrap Up followed by demonstrations


There will be videos of the speakers online after the event.

(With thanks to Scottish Genes for making me aware of the event)