Belleville (Ontario) Directory, 1940 By Vernons with residential and business listings.

Cat No.:   CA0309:

Vernon’s are one of Canada’s best recognized publishers of directories. This one provides their service for the southern Ontario city of Belleville for the year 1940 although it can normally be assumed that the process of canvassing the inhabitants, collating, editing, typesetting, printing and publishing will mean that some of the data is at least a year old. Belleville, sometimes called the friendly city, is centrally situated on the northern shore of the Bay of Quinte in an area originally heavily settled by Loyalists.

In addition to Miscellaneous and Classified Business Directory sections the major portion of the directory is taken up by an Alphabetical Directory of names and a Street Directory. Both of these sections list both the names of individuals and those of businesses, public and private.

In the Alphabetical Directory individuals are listed with both their residential and business address, as well as with their trade or profession. Married couples are listed together, the listing being in the husband’s name with the wife’s name being given in parenthesis. Unmarried women and widows are listed under their own names with the name of a dead husband being given in parenthesis. The directory claims the population of Belleville to be 15,700 at this time so we believe that the Alphabetical Directory is attempting to identify all the adults in the city, both residents and those who only work in the city i.e., residing elsewhere (usually identified in their listing by the city/area name but not the address.)

The Street Directory lists every building on every street by number, and usually identifies the primary occupants by name. Obviously listings of large organizations, such as CNR, CPR and the Civic offices, only identify the most senior inhabitant. (Most civic and local government employees can also be identified from the Miscellaneous Directory pages.)

There is local advertising on virtually every page in the directory as well as on the covers and the “fly” pages.

Because these directories were made down to a price some of the typesetting and printing was less than ideal but we have compensated for this by providing the best quality scans we could make and by carefully hand editing the OCR results so that the computer search-ability is at least up to our normal high standard.

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No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-897405-44-4 ;