Genealogy Chat

Can anyone help with where to look for the names of the people living at an address past current available censuses for England. Are there searchable phone books or street directories available ? I have a death certificate which I have purchased which states the address and the person who reported the death living at the same address. I want to find out who else lives at this address at the time of the death which would break open a brick wall for me. It would also help if I could find out the years previous also.

Thanks

Pittsy :-)

BT on line -- but you have to search county by county

http://www.thephonebook.bt.com/publisha.content/en/search/residential/search.publisha

The electoral roll at www.192.com -- I'll go find the tips I posted on Chat today and copy them here.

Keep in mind that for the phone book and electoral roll you do have to have a name.

However, my understanding (I'm not in the UK, and in Canada it's a criminal offence to disclose personal information from the list of electors) is that electoral rolls can be accessed at the library local to the address, and you can look up the specific address (in fact, that's the only way you can search them).

I think that's what you want to do.

192.com only has the last 10 years for electoral rolls, and you didn't mention what year you're after.

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One thing I can suggest is that googling sometimes works better than a free search at 192.com. You may have to do it a number of times to train your google for what you want.

Try googling, e.g.,

"Jane Q Smith" www.192.com

the first few times. The thing is that you then get results that show you a location -- city, county and first part of postcode -- whereas using 192.com directly will only get you the name.

You can then check at BT online to see whether you can find a matching entry.

You can also do it the other way: find the J Smiths in the probable location at BT on line, then search at 192.com for Smith with the postcode from the BT listing to see who that Smith is. I often manage to match up entries that way -- the household at 192.com is correct (right person with right spouse), and matches an address found at BT.

Another tip for 192.com is how to avoid the "you have exceeded the maximum number of free searches" problem.

Go to where cookies are in your browser -- in Firefox it's Tools, Options, Show Cookies -- select the 192.com cookies, and delete them. **Be careful not to click "delete all cookes"!**

Then you can start over again.

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(pleeease do unlock that loud caps key for your subject lines)

Janey - thanks for this wonderful information. I will starting searching. The period I am after is 1950 - 1973 in England. Apologies re the caps for subject - I am a retired Secretary and this is the way we always put subject headings. I appreciate times change and will fix this if it is offending.

Pittsy :-)