Historical Directories (University of Leicester)

Ephemera related to trades (such as trade cards or advertisements) are often undated. Directories are an invaluable tool in establishing dates for a business at a particular address. The University of Leicester's Historical Directories project is "a digital library of local and trade directories for England and Wales, from 1750 to 1919", with its main focus on directories of the 1850s, 1890s and 1910s. It doesn't claim to be at all comprehensive, which does mean that you cannot trace a firm through its different addresses for example. You could, however, easily establish which businesses were in Broad Street, Oxford in 1839 or discover how many ironmongers (17), lime burners (3) or milliners (39 excl straw hat makers) there were in Exeter in 1844. A keyword search for Exeter in Pigott's 1844 directory (Pigot & Co.'s Directory of Berks, Bucks ... , 1844. [Part 1: Berks to Glos]) also reveals fascinating information about coach transport, delivery of letters etc between Exeter and other towns.

The directories can be searched by location (including an interactive map), decade, and by keywords.  The online directories can be searched by name, street name, trade, etc. with hit-highlighting on the digital images.
There are also useful tips, case studies, and links to other resources on the History notes pages.

(C) University of Leicester

The British Book Trade Index

The BBTI, hosted at the University of Birmingham is a superb tool for dating booktrade and other ephemera. Covering a multiplicity of book-related trades, such as ink maker, gold beater, engraver, lithographer, auctioneer, librarian/owner of circulating library, stationer, and publisher, the resource goes far beyond dating booktrade ephemera and is helpful in dating any ephemera with an imprint. Its scope is England and Wales to 1851. Aseparate Scottish booktrade index is hosted by the National Library of Scotland.

Information given about each tradesman includes (where known) dates of birth and death, addresses with associated dates, apprenticeships, successors, and trades. Sources of information are given and contributions can be made to the database.

As an example, this is the BBTI information for Abel Sweetland of Exeter, enabling us to date the trade card in the John Johnson Collection to 1783-85 and that of his widow Margaret to 1787-96.

(C) BBTI

JJ Coll Provincial Booktrade 2 (13)

British Newspaper Archive: British Library

The new British Newspaper Archive is a wonderful resource not only in itself, but also for contextualising and dating ephemera. .Functionality is superb, with browsing, searching, filtering of results, interactive map, highlights, facility to save search results to a personal workspace, etc. Searching is free and you see thumbnails of your results, but outside the British Library a subscription is necessary to see the full images.

© brightsolid Newspaper Archive Limited 2011