Pat W. wrote: "Does anyone know how the information was collected? I wonder if it was house to house enquiries and that is why some house numbers are missing - or even whole streets in some areas." Hmmm, Pat, what an interesting question. And I have no idea about the answer. Perhaps someone else might know. In many areas the directories do seem to be just for trades. I can never find my north east coal miners in any of them. However, Manchester and perhaps other large cities like Liverpool, London, Birmingham etc. chose to include a street by street list of inhabitants. Perhaps it sold more directories. In the days before telephone directories, it would have been useful to many people to have these lists. I find it useful to "walk" down the longer streets and note the cross-streets as they appear. It's almost as good as a map. And sometimes it can explain why the census enumerator did odd things. It's often because a house was on a corner or there was a house that had a back door on one street and a front door on another. My mother tells a story about her aunts who used to visit her corner house in Levenshulme when she was a child. The aunts were sisters who hadn't spoken to each other for years. They seemed to have ESP about the whereabouts of the other. One aunt would be sitting in the back parlour sipping tea and then would suddenly leap to her feet and rush out of the side door. At the same moment the other sister would walk in the front door (which was a shop). They were a very eccentric family and there are lots of similar stories. But back to the directories.... I don't know about your ancestors but mine rarely spent more than a year at the same address. I can imagine that in some areas it would hardly be worth listing the occupants as by the time the directory was produced, it would all have changed. But really, I have no idea about any of it. I'd be glad to hear the opinions of other listers. Regards, Irene

All that I can add is that there was a finite time between collecting the information and printing the directoy. I have an instance where the person listed as "head of the business" had died 18 months before the date of the directory. Just something else to bear in mind. Heather Irene Marlborough wrote: > Pat W. wrote: > > "Does anyone know how the information was collected? I wonder if it was house to house enquiries and that is why some house numbers are missing - or even whole streets in some areas." > > I don't know about your ancestors but mine rarely spent more than a year at the same address. I can imagine that in some areas it would hardly be worth listing the occupants as by the time the directory was produced, it would all have changed. But really, I have no idea about any of it. I'd be glad to hear the opinions of other listers. > > Regards, Irene >