Published on Tuesday, 29 October 2024 at 4:39:08 PM
Welcome to #TimeWarpTuesday and the launch of a new research tool – the Victoria Park Street Directory (1895-1949)!
Over the years as our Local History Coordinator conducts research and assists people with their local history inquiries, she has also been creating a listing for each street researched and listing the people who lived in the street in each year from when the street first came into existence until 1949.
Our Victoria Park Street Directory (1895-1949) is a compilation of data sourced from Wise's Post Office Directories. Using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as the platform for the work. There is a ‘tab’ for each street, lane and road in the boundaries of Victoria Park and its suburbs. Please note that not all streets have been researched as yet, it is an ongoing project, so please check back regularly on our website for updates.
Within each tab of the Directory, you can scroll from the column for 1895 through to the column for 1949 and see when the street was first established and watch as more people move into the street over the years. In some areas you can see the change of use of properties in the streets, from being farming, to residential and businesses etc. In general, street numbers don’t appear in our streets until circa 1914.
In the images with this post, you will see a screenshot of a section of the ‘tab’ for Berwick Street, Victoria Park. You will notice that each tab has information on when the street was ‘founded’ if it is known, also if the street ever had a different name or names, these also appear in the tab for the street, along with a reference to show when the dates became official.
As mentioned, our Victoria Park Street Directory is compiled from data contained in Wise’s Post Office Directories.
Wise’s are the postal directories for Perth and Western Australia, and they have been digitised and made available via the State Library's web page. You can find the digitised version of Wise's Post Office Directory, from which our street directory is compiled at: https://slwa.wa.gov.au/collections/collections/post-office-directories.
The names listed in Wise’s postal directories, it should be noted, are the names of the person who was registered at the GPO to receive mail at that address. The person listed therefore, is not necessarily the owner of the property, they may have been renting. The directory works by area first then alphabetically by street. It also contains an alphabetical listing of people by surnames and other indexes to government services, trades and businesses, etc.
Please go to our website to download and search the latest edition of the Victoria Park Street Directory
#LoveVicPark
Compilation image of various street signs around the Town of Victoria Park.
Local History Collection, Town of Victoria Park Library Service.
A screenshot of the ‘Berwick St, Victoria Park’ tab in the Victoria Park Street Directory (1895-1945)
Local History Collection, Town of Victoria Park Library Service.
Title page of the 1912 Western Australian Wise’s Post Office Directory.
Courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia.
A sample of the scanned images of Wise's Post Office Directories as they appear on the State Library Website.
This page is from the 1925 edition of Wise’s Post Office Directory, pp. 296-297.
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