The National Library of Scotland has more than 700 digitized Post Office Directories available online, spanning 1773 to 1911. These directories are similar to city directories on other countries: residents are listed with their names, addresses, yearly rent or values, and (in many cases) occupations.
You can browse the directories page by page in a web browser, if you wish. A built-in search capability on the web site allows you to search the first several letters of a last name, a place, and a year. However, I believe you will find that to be a very slow method of searching the directories. You probably will prefer to download and entire directory to your computer. The downloads are also a bit slow but still much faster than reading the pages one at a time. Once downloaded, you can read the pages much more quickly as data is retrieved from your local hard drive, not from the Internet.
The National Library of Scotland's Post Office Directories are available at http://digital.nls.uk/directories/index.html.
If you enjoyed this article, please share it with others. Tweet it, share it on Google+, Facebook or on your preferred social network.
Republishing of this article in newsletters, blogs, and elsewhere is allowed and encouraged, with a few minor restrictions. Details may be found at http://goo.gl/hoHH1.
Of course, if you haven’t done so already, you should join my email newsletter mailing list to stay current on my latest articles and announcements. You can also cancel at any time within seconds.
You also might like to leave a comment below.
