Burns & Harris's Directory of Dundee 1927–1928 – Digital Download or CD-ROM

Step back into Dundee in the late 1920s — the era of the "Three Js" (Jute, Jam and Journalism), tangerine-kitted footballers and Prohibitionist politicians. This beautifully scanned edition of Burns & Harris's Directory captures the city street by street, family by family, at a moment in time that falls squarely in one of Scotland's great genealogical blind spots.

A Perfect "Census Substitute"

This directory sits in a genuine gap in the Scottish census record:

• The last census available before this directory is 1921 (Scotland's was only released in 2022)..
• That leaves a thirty-year void between 1921 and 1951 — and this directory lands right in the middle of it, making it an invaluable tool for tracing families across those missing decades.

And there's another reason to look here: then, as now, many people distrusted the government and simply refused to complete their census forms. Whether through fear of officialdom, the taxman or sheer stubbornness, some of your ancestors may have deliberately gone uncounted. But they had no such objection to a commercial directory printing their name, address and trade for all to see. If your family is "missing" from the census, there's a very real chance they're listed here instead.

What's Inside — Section by Section

(Contents may vary slightly between editions, but directories of this type typically include:)

• Alphabetical Directory of Residents — the heart of the book: private residents listed A–Z with addresses, and often occupations and household details. This is where you'll find your ancestors.
• Street Directory — every street, road, square, terrace and court in the city listed in order, showing the occupiers at each house number. Essential for pinpointing exact addresses.
• Trades & Professions Directory — businesses classified under headings (jute merchants, bakers, milliners, solicitors, publicans and hundreds more), with names and addresses. Perfect if you know what your ancestor did but not where.
• Civic & Official Directory — town councillors, magistrates, officials of the police, post office, customs, parochial boards and kirk sessions.
• Churches & Clergy — every congregation in the city and its minister, spanning the full spectrum of Dundee's denominations.
• Schools, Hospitals & Institutions — including Dundee Royal Infirmary, University College, schools and charitable institutions.
• Clubs, Societies & Lodges — masonic lodges, friendly societies, trade unions, temperance societies and sporting clubs.
• Neighbouring Districts — coverage extending to surrounding areas such as Broughty Ferry and Monifieth.
• Miscellany — postal arrangements, carriers, transport information and other practical local detail of 1927–28.

Famous Faces & Local Connections

Dundee in 1927–28 was home to some remarkable characters — you may even find them in these pages:

• Edwin Scrymgeour — Dundee's sitting MP and the only person ever elected to the British Parliament for the Prohibition Party, defeating Winston Churchill in 1922.
• D.C. Thomson & Co. — the publishing giant behind The Sunday Post and the Courier, whose later creations (Oor Wullie, The Broons, The Beano and The Dandy) would make Dundee Britain's comics capital.
• Mary Garden — the world-famous operatic soprano raised in Dundee, one of the great divas of the age.
• William McGonagall — the weaver-poet famously dubbed "the worst poet in the world," whose Tay Bridge Disaster verses remain legendary.
• Mary Slessor — the Dundee mill girl who became one of Scotland's most celebrated missionaries.
• The Jute Barons — the Cox, Baxter, Buist and Gilroy dynasties whose mills and mansions dominated the city.

Dundee in the 1920s — Local Colour

• Industry: The jute capital of the world. Cox's Camperdown Works in Lochee was among the largest jute mills on earth, its "Cox's Stack" chimney towering over the city. James Keiller & Son produced the world-famous marmalade — reputedly invented in Dundee in 1797 — alongside the classic Dundee cake.
• Journalism: D.C. Thomson's Sunday Post was one of the best-selling newspapers in Britain.
• Sport: The city's two great rivals — Dundee F.C. at Dens Park (Scottish Cup winners 1910) and Dundee United at Tannadice, who had recently adopted their famous tangerine colours. Forfarshire Cricket Club was based at Forthill, and golf thrived at the city's courses.
• Music & Entertainment: The grand Caird Hall with its mighty concert organ, plus bustling music halls and theatres, kept the city singing night after night.
• Maritime heritage: The RSS Discovery, built in Dundee for Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition, was still hard at work on oceanographic research duty in the late 1920s — decades before returning home to the Tay.

Format & Navigation

• Choice of instant digital download or CD — no installation required, just open in any PDF reader.
• Scanned images of the original pages, preserving the look and feel of the 1920s original.
• Easy to browse: thanks to the alphabetical arrangement of the residents' and trades' listings, you can navigate the directory intuitively even without searching.
• OCR on the fly: modern PDF readers — including the built-in viewer in Google Chrome — use Google Lens technology to OCR the pages automatically as you view them. That means you can search the text, copy names, translate the content into other languages, and even use text-to-speech to have it read aloud (text-to-speech and these smart features are available on desktop PCs only).

Please Note

The town map that originally accompanied the directory is not included in this scan, unless otherwise stated in the listing above. Some scans of directories in this series omit the map, so please check the sample images before purchasing.