How to find out who lived in your house on The Isle of Thanet around 1900

The pictures in this post should expand big enough to download with a couple of clicks if you want to have play with them.

Ramsgate Circa 1850

In Wednesday's blog post I published this map of East Thanet 

East Thanet Map Circa 1910

If you click on it a couple of times it gets big enough to read the writing a lot of local people looked at it (3,500 from my web stats) and there was a lot of comment on the local Facebook groups that I linked it to.

The main questions seem to boil down to. Where is my house?

Individual houses are shown on the OS maps and you can access them on line here is the link 

and this link for if you are having difficulties once you have clicked on your square then click on the map on the right.

Using this site requires some ITC skills but if you do it right you can get the historic maps to open in good definition e.g. here is the link to a Margate one and here is a link to a Ramsgate one 

The instructions for who lived in your house in 1900 involve coming here to Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate (Opening hours Monday 10am to 5pm Tuesday Closed Wednesday 10am to 5pm Thursday Closed Friday 10am to 5pm Saturday 10am to 5pm Sunday Closed All Bank Holidays Closed) 

Make your way to the cheap reprints of historic Thanet directories 

The shelves look like this. the directories cover the period from 1849 to 1974, find your house in one of the more recent directories and then work your way carefully backwards in time (street names and house numbers change over time.

If you can't get to Michaels Bookshop in Ramsgate we do post them here is the link All of the directories pages are scans of the pages in the original directories. You can access some local directories online but be careful as many of them have been produced using ocr and contain a lot of mistakes.

The Thanet public libraries have some directories which you can sometimes look at, they tend to be part of the archives rather than out on open shelving. 

We usually have a few original directories, these tend to be delicate and expensive. 

Ramble

It's a marvellous summers day here in Ramsgate and I am looking forward to 5pm when we close the bookshop and can go and sit on the sundeck of Wetherspoons aka The Royal Victoria Pavilion Ramsgate. 

For such a nice day it's fairly busy here at Michaels Bookshop I suppose there is only so much sunshine that people can take. I am reading The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks, which is very good, we are unlikely to have it in stock for a while as it has only just come out.

We went book buying in Canterbury yesterday, Oxfam and hospice bookshops mostly. We bought quite a few books for stock here at Michaels Bookshop, mostly post 1900 literary fiction which we are always short of. Here is the link to the newly priced books we have just put on the shelves. 

We have just had one of the Cervia volunteers in the shop.

They are very pleased with some Ramsgate items they have just had made from one of the photos taken from this blog.

 

 Finally I managed to get out of the bookshop to walk down the road and look at the newly reopened Ramsgate market, it was bigger and busier than I expected