Bring Your Ancestor's Lives Into Focus With Old Trade Directories
I've used old trade directories before, when I was tracing my tradesmen ancestors down in the City of Plymouth in Devon, England
. At that time I'd found one enterprising forebear, of mine, who had been a Victualler and Brass founder on the 1861 census employing one woman, six men and some boys in this South Western English City. This discovery had lead me on to use the University of Leicester's Historical Directories website to find him and his advertisement in a Plymouth Trade Directory. Its great fun to see how polite were the written requests of a Victorian era businessman, when asking for trade from his prospective customers, in an advertisement from this time.
As my family history research continued, I had turned my attention to my maternal great-grandfather. In a book, complied on this side of the family that I was lucky enough to have found on the library shelves of the Society of Genealogists in Goswell Road, London, my ancestor was given a brief mention in between his more illustrious brother's, cousin's and forefather's. What I was able to glean, from this publication, was that my ancestor had been a merchant in London for a period in the 1860s, after a short spell in the army.
The book had been edited and complied by my 2x great-grandfather and his cousin. It gave me a clue that all was not well in the business world of my great-grandfather, as a line of text simply informed the reader that he had been a "Partner in the firm of Stevens & Hay, Merchants in London; on its failure he became a tea-planter in Ceylon."
My first reaction was to see if the business went bankrupt and was mentioned in the London Gazette. I checked their website, where it is possible to search back through the archives for free - but I found nothing on the business in question. Now, I'd read a tip that it was always worth checking both of the sister publications of the London Gazette, in case the bankruptcy had been hidden in one or other of the Edinburgh or Belfast Gazettes. The results, however, came back negative in each case and so it looks to me as if the business was wound up without it going into bankruptcy.
Recently, on taking a look around online data sets, I came across the 1869 Kelly's Post Office Directory for London on a subscription website. By entering the business name, in the search box, I was eventually able to locate my great-grandfather's business to an office at 65 Fenchurch Street, London. EC3.
Moving on, to a Kelly's Directory for 1880 London, I was able to find my great-grandfather listed as living in Princes Square, Bayswater, London. Also at that address was his married sister, whose husband was in the Madras Civil Service and I assume away in India at the time. But I had already begun investigating the move by my great-grandfather to Ceylon (today the former British Colony is known as Sri Lanka). By 1880 he began to appear in an old trade directory for that island, as well as in the one for London's Bayswater!
From a website, dedicated to the history of Ceylon Tea, I now found that they carry hyperlinks to many years of the Ferguson's Ceylon Directory. In 1880 my forebear was an Assistant for R.Books & Co of London, in the Colony. He then goes on to appear in several of the directories, one of which has him as Chairman of his local area's planters association and then, in 1905, he was listed as the owner of a tea estate called Denmark in Dolosbage, Ceylon.
This little peep into my great-grandfather's life was made possible by the use of the various trade directories that have been scanned and uploaded to websites on the internet. But before I turned off my computer, on a whim I decided to enter the address that he had shared with his sister in London into the Google street view for the area. I was rewarded with the sight of the Georgian fronts of Princes Square and easily found the house where he once lived. It is now a small hotel and so its address is on the internet to find.
A search for 65 Fenchurch Street, and the offices, shows that they have been replaced by a modern vista, of steel, glass and concrete. Lastly, I did a Google search for the Denmark Tea Estate in Sri Lanka and by chance it still exists. Using Google Earth I was able to use the satellite view to see, from the air, the hillside estate that once was where my great-grandfather cultivated tea.
The teaching point that I am trying to make, with this article, is that it seems to me to be well worth using some of these alternative tools, when doing our family history research. They may add just a little bit of flesh to the dry bones of facts gained from the census data, or the birth, marriage and death records for our ancestors. Family history is about more than when and where a person was born and we should always look to see what can help us better fill out the stories of our ancestor's lives.
by: Nick Thorne
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