Discover where your Dublin ancestor lived and worked in Pettigrew and Oulton’s Dublin Almanack. Find out their address and their occupation in the 1830s and 40s in Dublin’s earliest street directory.
Discover where your Dublin ancestor lived and worked in Pettigrew and Oulton’s Dublin Almanack. Find out their address and their occupation in the 1830s and 40s in Dublin’s earliest street directory.
Each search result will bring you to the page of the Almanack where your ancestor was listed. The amount of information varies but you can find out the following about your ancestor.
Since most people rented in Dublin at this time, they moved around more frequently. You can chart how your ancestor moved around the city and how their occupation changed over time. The Almanack covers most professions and trades, so those with businesses can generally be found among its pages.
Pettigrew and Oulton’s was the first annual publication to include a street by street directory of Dublin. Since people moved far more in the 19th century, with owning property far rarer than today, this can be the best way to keep track of your ancestor’s movements.
First published in 1834, the Almanack provided not simply a street directory but also an alphabetical list of inhabitants, grouped by profession. It should be noted, however, that the alphabetical list is less comprehensive than the street directory. As well as the directory, the Almanack also listed the officers of virtually every Dublin institution, club and society, as well as clergy of all denominations.
The coverage also extends beyond the city itself. Under the title of “Official Authorities of Counties and Towns”, Pettigrew and Oulton record the names of many of the rural gentry and well off inhabitants of large towns in their roles as local administrators. As with the city itself, the better known institutions and societies are listed, as are the more prominent local clergy.
Pettigrew and Oulton’s was published until 1845 when it was superseded by Alexander Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, which started publication in 1844 and continues to the present day.
As well as these PDF volumes, Findmypast also has indexed versions of Pettigrew and Oulton’s Almanack for the years 1835 and 1845. The PDF version of the Almanack, as well as covering more years, also allows for a wider search as the OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, search will find every instance of your ancestor’s name within the text rather than simply as indexed.
These records are presented in PDF format and the search uses OCR technology to find the name you are searching for. This works slightly differently from our usual search so we have put together some tips to help you.
When searching for a name you must use the form of the name as it appears within the document. You cannot search for name variants. Please be aware that first names were usually abbreviated. William will often be listed as Wm, for example, or James as Jas.
You can use wildcard searches to help find these variations. A question mark can be included in your search to replace adjacent letters while an asterisk will look for words. So if you were looking for William, entering W? would bring back Wm, W., Will or William.
Putting inverted commas around your search term, for example “John Smith” will look for those two words side by side. Without the commas the search results will show all pages that contain both John and Smith, but not necessarily together on the page.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for first time, then try other variations of your search. Try all the different ways the name could appear.