www.historicaldirectories.org

[garstonite]

Kiterunner...That`s my 4 x g grandfather Daniel Oakes b 1792 I THINK...How can I prove it though....he would have been 36...I`ve just realised Thomas b 1818( 3 x g grandfather ,the blacksmith) would have only been 10..lol....thanks a lot Kiterunner...it was nice to see my family listed 180 myears ago....now that you`ve edjumicated me, I will spend a bit of time on that site...allan

[Nell]

Some useful info on this site, but I find it a bit "clunky" to use.

Anyone with London rellies, the Guildhall Library has gazillions of London directories on microfilm/fiche. Much easier to whizz through them if you can.

The National Archives library at Kew also has lots of directories - I always have a look there when I am waiting for my documents or have a spare few minutes.

[Mary from Italy]

Ancestry also has some directories, but they're extremely badly indexed, so the Historical Directories site usually produces better results.

[kiterunner]

Historical Directories has the directories fully indexed (although of course some names / words have come out wrong because of blurred print or whatever), and so if you are looking for someone in London or another big city and don't know what address they would be at, you can find them pretty quickly on Historical Directories. If you had to search through all the streets on ancestry or microfiche / microfilm it could take forever! But there are some directories listing names in alphabetical order which are easier to search.

[Mary from Italy]

Ancestry also has an OCR system, I think, but if you're looking for Fred Bloggs there's no way to do a phrase search; it brings up all pages with the words Fred and Bloggs on them, even if they're not together.

[Tilly Mint]

Ooh, i've learned from this thread - Thankyou

Had some good "finds" too