Kelly's Directory

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In the United Kingdom, the Kelly's, Post Office and Harrod & Co Directory (almost always known as Kelly's) was in effect a Victorian version of today's Yellow Pages.

Origins

The origins of Kelly's Directory can be traced to 1799 when Frederic Festus Kelly – His Majesty’s Inspector of Inland Letter Carriers – created the Post Office London Directory. In 1802, Kelly & Co Ltd was launched and throughout the 19th century Frederic Kelly gradually built upon his original publication, producing directories for an increasing number of UK counties.

Contents

The directories contained a list of all:

• businesses
• tradespeople
• local gentry
• landowners
• charities and
• other facilities located in a particular village or town etc.

Many reference libraries still keep their copies of these directories, which are now an important source for historical research.

Other publications followed including the Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes (1875) and Merchants, Manufacturers and Shipper’s (1877) until finally in 1897, Kelly & Co Ltd was renamed Kelly’s Directories Ltd. This name stuck for another 106 years before being renamed Kellysearch in 2003 to reflect its focus away from hard copy directories and towards an Internet based product search engine.

Kellysearch

Today, Kelly's exists online as Kellysearch, a directory similar to the online Yellow Pages. Kellysearch.com was established in Boston in 2004.

Kellysearch.co.uk^[1], not constrained by bookbinding limits, CD data storage capabilities or publication dates now contains continually updated product and service information on over 2 million companies around the world. There are Kellysearch business units set up to serve specific markets, namely:

• Kellysearch.com^[2] US
• Kellysearch.co.uk^[3] UK
• Kellysearch.nl^[4] Netherlands
• Kellysearch.co.in^[5]- India
• Kellysearch.de^[6] - Germany
• KellysearchAsia.com^[7] - South East Asia.

It is now in many different languages and in the last few years has introduced a fully searchable online-catalogue library and product press release section.

The old editions of the Kelly’s Directories are seen as highly collectable by many and have also become a useful reference tool for people tracing the history of local areas (with the ancient data now available to buy on CD Rom from many entrepreneurial sources for this purpose.) Every copy of the Kelly’s Directory ever published is held in the Guildhall Library ^[8] in London.

References

External links

• The Historical Directories website has extensive online versions of old editions for England and Wales

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