Altrincham Area Directory, 1906

This database contains Slater's Directory for the Altrincham area in Cheshire, England. This area includes the towns of Altrincham, Ashton-on-Mersey, Baguley, Bowdon, Brooklands, Carrington, Dunham Massey, Partington, and Sale. This directory is divided into several portions. The first is a historical description of Altrincham and the surrounding area. Following that is a street register, alphabetical directory, and trade directory. Although each of these directories serve different purposes they may provide you with very similar information, for each of them usually list the names of the heads of households, their addresses, and occupational information.

City directories are primarily useful for locating people in a particular place and time. They can tell you generally where an ancestor lived and give an exact location for census years. They are also useful for linkage with sources other than censuses.

Some city directories list adult children who lived with their parents but were working or going to school. Look for persons of the same surname residing at the same address. If analyzed and interpreted properly, these annual directories can tell you (by implication) which children belong to which household, when they married and started families of their own, and when they established themselves in business. In cases where specific occupation is given, you can search records pertinent to that occupation.

Taken from Chapter 11: Research in Directories, The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy by Gordon Lewis Remington; edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated, 1997).