Sands Directory

The Sands Directories, also published as the Sands and Kenny Directory and the Sands and McDougall Directory were annual publications in Australia.

They listed household, business, society, and Government contacts in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney including some rural areas of Victoria and New South Wales from the 1850s.City directories are an important resource for historical research, allowing individual addresses and occupations to be linked to specific streets and suburbs.

John Sands (1818-1873) was an engraver, printer and stationer. Born in England he moved to Sydney in 1837. Sands formed several business partnerships, in 1851 with his brother-in-law Thomas Kenny, and in 1860 with Dugald McDougall with the business being known as Sands, Kenny & Co. Directory titles changed as the publisher changed partners, and at different points the Sands Directories were also published as the 'Sands and Kenny' or 'Sands and McDougall Directories'.

The first Melbourne Directory was published by Sands and Kenny in 1857. By 1858 the second edition of the directory was distributed to public libraries in the major seaports of Great Britain, Ireland, the United States of America, and Canada. From 1862 to 1974 the Melbourne directories were published as the Sands and McDougall Melbourne Directory.

The 1860 Melbourne directory was 400 pages long and contained over 10,000 entries.

The Sands Sydney, Suburban and Country Commercial Directory, first published in 1858, included a variety of information including street addresses and businesses, farms and country towns, stock numbers (e.g. horses, cattle and sheep on each station) as well as information about public watering places including dams, tanks and wells. With the primary function of post office directory it provides lists of householders, businesses, public institutions and officials.

The Sydney editions of the directory, covering the state of New South Wales, were published each year from 1858–59 to 1932–33. There were four years when the directory did not appear during this time, they were 1872, 1874, 1878 and 1881. The directory is arranged by municipalities in which properties were located, listing the primary householder street by street. As a consequence, the household and business information in the directories is used for research into Sydney history, with particular application for genealogical research.

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