Historical Vernon City Directories Mapped

This initiative aims to provide scholars, researchers, and the public with a visual directory, index, and account of Kitchener's residential, business and industrial development. This Historical GIS project takes decades of digitized Vernon city directories (years 1901+), cleanses, collates and geo-locates over a million searchable individual entries using a map platform. Users can filter, view and download historical facts about Kitchener's residents and businesses, offering endless discovery and research opportunities. 

Access to the webmap and downloadable data are available from the project's main page. Access to the raw files (.csv tabular data) are available below and a list of all street name and number changes have also been collated. Additionally, several sample maps of the historical dataset have been created to demonstrate how the data can be used for research purposes. Links to these online maps are also available below. 

The table below provides downloadable Vernon Directory Excel files, available for each year the Geospatial Centre had access to. The files were created by transcribing the directory information, matching historical address information to modern ones, and adding map location information for spatial purposes. R denotes Residential information (name, occupation) and B denotes Business information.

Coming Soon

Samples of historical analysis:

Coming soon

Funding and Acknowledgement: 

This project has been funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as well as the University of Waterloo Library. We would like to acknowledge support from Karen Ball-Pyatt, from the Kitchener Public Library as well as Darryl Bonk, from Waterloo Region Generations who have generously provided us with scanned versions of the city directories.