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TRADE DIRECTORIES
Like many sources for Irish genealogy, when directories are good they're very, very good, and when they're bad they're horrid. The main problem is that they cover only very specific areas and classes of people. Until the end of the nineteenth century they include only towns and they always exclude small tenant farmers, servants and landless labourers, the vast majority of our ancestors, in other words.
This much said, for town-dwellers, however modest, they can provide superb information. The very least a directory entry can show is precisely where a family lived at the time the entry was made. The further up the social scale you go, through traders, merchants, professionals and gentry, the more they reveal. Followed over a series of years -particularly in the Dublin and Belfast directories -the entries can show growing or declining prosperity, and they provide evidence of death, inheritance, family connections and emigration.
When using directories, remember:
Because trade directories relate directly to specific areas, what you will find depends entirely on where your ancestors lived. The most comprehensive are those for Dublin, followed by some of the provincial publications and those that attempt to cover the entire island. In general the information given below only goes as far as the end of the nineteenth century.
DUBLIN DIRECTORIES
The earliest Irish directories are those published by Peter Wilson for Dublin city, starting in 1751 and continuing until 1837 with a break from 1754-9. Generally bound with John Watson's Almanack and the English Court Registry until it ceased publication in 1837, it was known as The Treble Almanack.
The information supplied by Wilson's Directory grew steadily, from the early alphabetical lists of merchants and traders, supplying names, addresses and occupations, to the inclusion of separate lists of officers of the city guilds and officers of Trinity College, state officials, those involved in the administration of medicine and the law, and Church of Ireland clergy. Some intermittent appearances from the early nineteenth century include pawnbrokers, bankers, apothecaries, police, dentists, physicians, militia officers and ships' captains.
Pettigrew and Oulton's Dublin Almanac and General Register of Ireland began annual publication in 1834 and saw the first street-by-street listing, initially only of the inhabitants of Dublin city, but gtowing year by year to encompass the suburbs. The 1835 edition added an alphabetical list of the individuals recorded in the street listings. The combination of the two listings should make it possible to track the movements of individuals around the city, an important feature since urban households moved frequently in the nineteenth century. However the alphabetical list is actually much less comprehensive than the street list.
Pettigrew and Oulton also extended the range of persons covered. As well as clergy and the officials of almost every Dublin institution, private and public, they broadened their coverage to areas outside Dublin supplying the names of many of the rural gentry and more prosperous inhabitants of the large towns. In effect these are mini- directories themselves, especially useful for rural towns without surviving directories in their own right.
After Pettigrew and Oulton came Alexander Thorn's Irish Almanac and Official Directory, which began in 1844 and has continued annual publication up to the present. As the name implies, it further broadened coverage outside Dublin and also extended the range of people included. In 1870 for example, as well as the alphabetical and street listings for Dublin, Thorn's gives alphabetical lists of the following for the entire country: army officers; attorneys, solicitors and barristers; bankers; Catholic, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian clergy; coast guard officers; doctors; MPs; magistrates; members of the Irish Privy Council; navy and marine officers; officers of counties and towns; and peers. Although Thom's is generally regarded as a Dublin directory, it is valuable for many areas well outside the city.
Dublin was also included in the countrywide publications of Pigot and Slater issued at intervals during the nineteenth century. The only significant difference here is the arrangement of the individuals listed under their trades, making it possible to identify all those engaged in the same occupation -important at a time when many occupations were handed down from one generation to the next.
Availability
Because the most useful way to approach Dublin directories is by going through a consecutive run of years to follow a family or business, it is important to have a continuous set. The most comprehensive collections are held by the Gilbert Library in Pearse Street, Dublin, the National Library and the National Archives. The LDS Library has microfilm copies of the earlier directories up to the start of Thom's, but only sparse copies after that.
COUNTRYWIDE DIRECTORIES
Until the publications of James Pigot and Co. in the early nineteenth century very little exists that covers the entire island of Ireland. The earliest countrywide directory covering more than the gentry was Pigot's Commercial Directory of Ireland published in 1820, which lists the towns of Ireland alphabetically and gives the nobility and gentry living in or close to the town, along with the traders of each town listed by trade. Pigot published a subsequent edition in 1824 and his successors, Slater's, issued expanded versions in 1846, 1856, 1870, 1881 and 1894. These followed the same basic format, dividing the country into four provinces and treating towns and villages alphabetically within each province. With each edition the scope of the directory was steadily enlarged, including ever more towns and villages. The most important differences between the various editions are as follows:
1824 onwards gives separate alphabetical listings for the clergy, gentry and nobility of Dublin and most of the larger urban centres.
1824 includes a countrywide alphabetical index to all the clergy, gentry and nobility listed in the entries for individual towns, which was omitted in subsequent issues.
1846 includes the names of schoolteachers for the towns treated, a practice continued in subsequent editions.
1881 supplies the names of the principal farmers near each of the towns tteated, giving the relevant parish. This feature was continued in the 1894 edition.
The best single collection of these directories is in the National Library where most of the early editions have now been transferred to microfiche.
Provincial directories
John Ferrar's Directory of Limerick, published in 1769, was the first directory to deal specifically with a provincial town, and the practice spread throughout Munster in the remaining decades of the eighteenth century, with Cork particularly well covered. In the nineteenth century local directories were produced in abundance, especially in areas with a strong commercial identity such as Belfast and the north-east and, again, Munster. The quality and coverage of these varies widely, from the street-by-street listings in Martin's 1839 Belfast Directory to the barest of commercial lists.
Some guides:
James Carty, National Library of Ireland Bibliography of Irish History 1870--1911, Dublin,
1940.
Edward Evans, Historical and Bibliographical Account of Almanacks, Directories etc. in Ireland from the Sixteenth Century, Dublin, 1897 (Facsimile ed. Blackrock, Carraig Books, 1976).
M. E. Keen, A Bibliography of Trade Directories of the British Isles in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1979.
Microfilm copies of many of the directories are available for purchase online. See www.vinehall. com.au.