City directories as research resources: Municipal Hall foyer display spring 2023
Historic city directories as a research resource for house, local, and family history: not just names and telephone numbers!
Many of the directories are online for the years 1860-1955: https://bccd.vpl.ca/
Image caption: Advertisement for the Union Hotel, from the First Victoria Directory https://bccd.vpl.ca/title/1860/First_Victoria_Directory.html
"This House is now conducted on the same principle as the "What Cheer House" of San Francisco. Board, per day $1.00. Rooms at $1 and $2 per week. Wash and Bath Room; also, a Select Private Reading Room with a Library of choice Books, Atlantic, European and California Newspapers."
Vancouver Public Library’s online collection of digitized British Columbia city directories dates from 1860 up to and including 1955. The directories contain detailed historical information about communities throughout the province, including:
- listings of individuals and businesses in Vancouver and Victoria (sometimes other communities as well, depending on the directory), indexed by name and by street
- population figures
- government listings
- operating newspapers
- schools and libraries .
Updated regularly, the directories document the growth, development and progress of British Columbia over the years.
You can use the directories to track the history of streets, communities and individual homes, find your ancestors, and research the history of companies and institutions.
Depending on the period and the directory, you may be able to find out:
- whether the occupant of a property was the owner or a renter
- the volume of different kinds of fish caught in BC in a given year
- individuals' occupations/employers/work places
- how many staff were in the local police or fire departments
- which houses in a street were vacant, new, or under construction in that year
- a street's former name
and many other kinds of information. The advertisements and illustrations also provide insight into the social norms, fashions and attitudes prevailing throughout the period.
– from https://bccd.vpl.ca/, adapted & edited
Image caption: "This Little Library Can Answer 945,000,000 Questions." Advertisement for directory reference libraries, once found across the US and Canada, located within e.g. Chambers of Commerce or public libraries. Nowadays, many historic directories have been digitized and are available online; local archives are often a good source of the hard copy volumes. - Image from a Wrigley Directory.
To avoid overwhelm at the thought of those 945 billion questions, this post will concentrate on navigating some promises and pitfalls of the street indexes, which continue in the city directories held in hard copy at Oak Bay Archives up to 1998. After that we have BC Tel/Telus/CanPages telephone directories for most years to 2016, but with increasing numbers of people choosing to go ex-directory (delisted), and directories indexing by name only, these are not nearly as comprehensive, or in certain ways as useful, as the city directories.
Image caption: The first listing of Oak Bay Avenue in the streets index, Williams' Directory, 1894.
NB! The order of listing properties on a street may change over time or according to different directory publishers. In this example, the north side is listed first, west to east, from Cadboro Bay Road (Fort) to Oak Bay, by which they mean the body of water, i.e. the eastern end of Oak Bay Avenue. Then the south side is listed *in the other direction*, east to west. This isn't explicit, and isn't obvious from street numbers, which weren't used yet - it has to be understood from the sequence of cross streets, which also often helps to sort out street name changes.
Remember that west of Foul Bay Road, Oak Bay Avenue is not in the municipality of Oak Bay! It's part of the City of Victoria, so this list from viHistory may be a useful shortcut - but not always. The first cross street listed on Oak Bay Ave is Hurlton Street, which we don't know by that name today. See Fire Insurance plans vol 2 (below) for the solution - Hurlton is now Redfern St. It's sometimes on maps as Hulton rather than Hurlton.
Beware inconsistent/changing formats in directory listings over time, and missing sections! Compare entries for Hampshire Road in 1900, 1910 and 1920:
Image caption: 1900 Henderson's Directory entry for "Hampshire Road, off Oak Bay Ave". There's no indication here of whether this is north or south of Oak Bay Avenue - for that we need to look at a year with more development on Hampshire and therefore detail in the directory.
(Where possible, we should also cross-check with a different source - here's the entry for the William Henry Noble House in the National Register of Historic Places, which gives a clue.)
Image caption: 1910 Henderson's Directory entry for "from 2250 Oak Bay Ave to Cranmore Road". South of the Avenue is only Noble's farm, while the intervening decade has seen considerable building on Hampshire (both sides, odd and even numbers) immediately north of Oak Bay Avenue. For the history of this section of Hampshire, known as Junction Road, see Gary Wilcox's account here. But as we follow Hampshire north of the Avenue, this raises another question: "Jolimont" at what is now 1936 Hampshire was already there, long since built in 1892, just north of Cranmore. When and how is it listed? That will have to be the subject of another post...
Image caption: 1920 Henderson's Directory entry for "from Central Avenue to 2200 Oak Bay Avenue". This list shows the development south of the Avenue in the 20 years since the sole entry for Noble's Farm. But where is the listing for Hampshire north of Cranmore? It's not present in the 1921 directory either. Let's check for a known cross street's own listing: Cranmore. The cross-street listing in Cranmore Road's entry reveals that Hampshire Road north of Oak Bay Avenue is separately named as... North Hampshire, under N. Wilcox above notes the sequence of name changes for this section of what now is all Hampshire, but we have to keep this in mind when using the contemporary directories too.
False Friends: The Case of the Disappearing Orchard
- a worked example of historical detective work based on information from the digitized city directories and other core sources.
As we have already seen, many streets' names have changed over the decades, and many names occur multiple times in different municipalities (and occasionally in the same one), sometimes during the same period. Directory descriptions (often) help to clarify which is referred to. For instance: let’s trace the history of Orchard Avenue in south Oak Bay, starting in the 1899-1900 directory.
It's a small street, only about a dozen houses long, so that should be straightforward… but we immediately hit a bump: the only Orchard listed in the street index is described as extending “from Government to Oak Bay Ave”. There are only two addresses listed on this street, both industrial businesses (a sash & door company and an iron works). This is definitely not the Orchard Avenue we are thinking of! So where is that Orchard, and what’s this one?
Let’s use the door factory as the focus of our fact-finding. From the names index of the 1899 directory we find the description
"Lemon, Gonasson & Co., Capital Planing Mills, Sash, Mantles, Band-Sawing, Doors, Moldings, Turning &c. Orchard, near Government, Rock Bay." In the 1899 directory, street numbers aren’t used here yet – but we know they eventually were. Did Lemon Gonasson & Co stay at the same address long enough to acquire a street address? If so, we’ll find out the 100-block of Orchard in relation to Government. They did, and the 1913 directory does give us an address with a number: 2324 Government. 
Lemon Gonasson are still at the same address, 2324 Government, in 1925. But despite Lemon Gonasson retaining it as part of their Government St address, Orchard St in Rock Bay is no longer listed in the streets index as of the 1914 directories. Meanwhile, Orchard Avenue in south Oak Bay has appeared.
The viHistory list at
https://hcmc.uvic.ca/~taprhist/content/documents/streetname_changes.php
lists many streets’ former names, but doesn’t include this one.
Again, a helpful feature of the street indexes is the inclusion of cross streets. The Government St entry in 1914 shows the location of Lemon Gonasson at the corner of Orchard, which runs parallel to and between Queens and Bay, and has one end at Government.
Note, though, that Orchard is listed as a cross street in the Tregillus-Thompson directory but not in the Henderson's. When in doubt, and where alternates are available, cross-check.
The 1899 directory states that it ran from Government to Oak Bay Avenue, but it certainly doesn’t now. So what happened to it? The cross streets give us a sufficiently specific location to start looking at maps.
The 1911-16 Fire Insurance Plan makes it clear:
[Image shows a section of the 1911-16 Fire Insurance Plan, detail centred on the intersection of Government & Bay Streets in Victoria. The map has been modified to highlight Orchard Street in blue.] Orchard was a small street in two sections, running between and parallel to Queens, just as we expected, from 1) Railroad Ave to Douglas and 2) Government to Rock Bay Avenue. Earlier maps show only the western section, and I haven't tried to find out when it first appears - well outwith my Oak Bay bailiwick. The eastern piece of Orchard Street survives today as Field Street, at the back of the Armouries.
Conclusion: “Oak Bay Ave” in the 1899 directory is a mistake for “Rock Bay Ave”.
Image caption: Detail showing Orchard St in Rock Bay, highlighting added. University of Victoria Fire Insurance Maps Collection. Vol.1 p.3. Page 19 shows even more detail of the Lemon Gonasson premises.
https://vault.library.uvic.ca/concern/generic_works/fd82fe38-5b56-4ce5-aea9-eb0781fa5570?locale=en
To close with some more illustrated ads from the directories,
Image caption: a selection of ads from the side bars of city directories, 1920s-1930s.
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Questions? Please get in touch!
Website: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives
Photo Search: https://www.oakbay.ca/archives/photographs
Blog posts: https://connect.oakbay.ca/archives
Email: archives@oakbay.ca
Phone: 250-598-3290
- Post by Anna Sander, 5 May 2023.
To cite: Sander, Anna. (2023, May). 'City directories as research resources: Municipal Hall foyer display spring 2023.' [Blog post]. District of Oak Bay, Archives. Retrieved from https://connect.oakbay.ca/admin/projects/archives/news_feed/city-directories-as-research-resources-municipal-hall-foyer-display-spring-2023 [date accessed].
