Source Information
About Canterbury and Vicinity Directory, 1889
This database contains the 1889 directory for Canterbury and the surrounding area, in Kent County, England. Other cities included in this directory are Faversham, Herne Bay, and Whitstable, as well as all the villages within a six-mile radius of Canterbury. The directory not only lists the names of the residents of these places, but it also includes historical information on each of the towns, a street directory, commercial directory, classified trades directory, and a listing of the local intelligence (which includes government officials and commissioners, board members, charities, places of worship, schools, etc.).
The following villages are included in this directory:
City directories are primarily useful for locating people in a particular place and time. They can tell you generally where an ancestor lived and give an exact location for census years. They are also useful for linkage with sources other than censuses.
There are usually several parts to a city directory. The section of most interest to the genealogist, of course, is the alphabetical listing of names, for it is there that you may find your ancestor.
Some city directories list adult children who lived with their parents but were working or going to school. Look for persons of the same surname residing at the same address. If analyzed and interpreted properly, these annual directories can tell you (by implication) which children belong to which household, when they married and started families of their own, and when they established themselves in business. In cases where specific occupation is given, you can search records pertinent to that occupation.
Once an ancestor has been found in a city directory, there are several ways the information can be used to gain access to, or link with, such sources as censuses, death and probate records, church records, naturalization records, and land records.
Taken from Chapter 11: Research in Directories, The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy by Gordon Lewis Remington; edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated, 1997).
