Henderson's Directories

Henderson's Directories were annual city directories published by Henderson Directories Limited of Winnipeg. Their editions for Fort William and Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) list residents, their occupations, employers and addresses, plus businesses and advertisements, and are among the main printed sources for who lived and worked in the Lakehead before the modern era. ThunderBay.wiki is working through them volume by volume: each person or business listed gets an article, or a new row in an existing article, with a citation to the printed page. This article summarises the series and how much of it is on the wiki so far.

The publisher and the series

Henderson Directories Limited was founded in Winnipeg in 1878 by James Henderson (about 1846–1919). It produced city directories for many cities of the Canadian West, including Winnipeg, Brandon, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and, in Ontario, Fort William and Port Arthur, and kept publishing until 2000. James's son James Selby Henderson became president in 1918 and held the post until he died in 1957; the head office was at 279–281 Garry Street, Winnipeg, from 1906 to 1955. That Garry Street address is the one printed in the Fort William and Port Arthur volumes of 1920 and 1950 (see Fort William City Directory and Henderson Directories Limited).

Directory staff went from door to door collecting names, jobs and addresses from households and businesses. Taking part was voluntary, so a directory is comprehensive but never complete: some people were missed, and others could ask to be left out. Titles and frequency varied, and not every year was published for every city.

What a volume contains

A Thunder Bay-area Henderson's typically has:

• an alphabetical directory of residents and firms, giving each person's occupation, employer, whether they headed a household, roomed or boarded, and their address (spouses' first names often appear in brackets);
• a classified business directory organised by trade;
• a street guide (in later volumes) that lists occupants address by address;
• lists of officials of city departments, school boards, churches and societies, together with a short civic history and statistics for the two cities, which the Thunder Bay Public Library calls the "Department of Miscellaneous Information";
• advertisements from local businesses, some with illustrations.

These features make the books useful for tracing a family from year to year, for finding who lived in a house, and for learning what a street's shops were at a given date.

Editions covered on ThunderBay.wiki

Year	Title as used here	Notes
1884	Henderson's North West Gazetteer and Directory	A regional gazetteer for the Northwest rather than a city directory. The wiki holds the photographed pages for Fort William, Port Arthur and Rat Portage (only the Fort William and Port Arthur entries are ingested).
1907	Henderson's Fort William City Directory and Henderson's Port Arthur City Directory	Two separate volumes the same year, one for each city (pages photographed from both volumes).
1913–14	Henderson's Twin Cities Fort William and Port Arthur Directory, Vol. VI	A single combined volume for both cities (Volume VI of the Twin Cities series).
1920	Henderson's Directory of Fort William and Port Arthur	One combined volume with a Fort William section and a Port Arthur section.
1950	Henderson's Directory of Fort William and Port Arthur	One combined volume with a Fort William section and a Port Arthur section; the largest dataset on the wiki so far.

Other years exist (for example a 1963 Twin Cities volume is online at FamilySearch) but have not been ingested yet.

Statistics

All figures are counted from the transcription and ingestion files, as of 29 October 2026. A "listing" is one printed directory entry, so the same person normally appears once in each year's volume; listings are not the same as unique people. "People" and "business" are the transcription's own classification of each entry. Advertisements were transcribed in a separate pass on 29 October 2026; the Advertisements column counts every printing of an ad (the same ad was often printed on many pages) and, in brackets, the distinct ads. Every advertiser has a business article with the ad's text, and ads with pictures are shown as cropped images.

Summary table

Year	Edition / city	Pages scanned	Pages transcribed	People listings	Business listings	Advertisements	Articles created	Articles updated	Status
1884	North West Gazetteer, Fort William / Port Arthur / Rat Portage (fragment)	38 photos	37	1,499	294	60 ad printings (44 distinct ads, 2 with pictures)	1,606	32	Done; duplicate cleanup done 29 October 2026; ads pass starting
1907	Fort William (fragment, pp. 4–85)	38 photos (two-page spreads)	76	4,340	548	126 ad printings (93 distinct ads, 3 with pictures)	4,306	265	Done; duplicate, widow and household cleanup done 29 October 2026; ads pass starting
1907	Port Arthur (fragment, pp. 152–243)	52 photos	98	4,488	689	124 ad printings (76 distinct ads, 5 with pictures)	4,343	161	Done; duplicate, widow and household cleanup done 29 October 2026; ads pass starting
1913–14	Twin Cities, Vol. VI (fragment, pp. 422–484)	47 photos	49	2,823	232	204 ad printings (142 distinct ads, 1 with pictures)	2,673	269	Done; widow and household linking done 29 October 2026; ads pass starting
1920	Fort William and Port Arthur	229 PDF pages	216 printed pages (in 108 spreads)	15,968	1,368	1,773 ad printings (600 distinct ads, 36 with pictures)	16,819	366	Ingested and converted to the new format
1950	Fort William and Port Arthur	704 PDF pages	479	34,219	2,083	1,882 ad printings (628 distinct ads, 21 with pictures)	35,523	941	Ingested and converted to the new format

Totals so far: 63,337 people listings and 5,214 business listings transcribed from the six volumes; 61,997 articles created and 1,813 updated.

Notes to the table. "Articles created" counts new person, business and disambiguation pages. "Articles updated" counts edits that added a listing to a page that already existed, for example a person already on the wiki or a business already listed. Photo-book "pages scanned" are the photographs that went into each PDF; the 1907 shots are two-page spreads (and a few 1913–14 shots), so "pages transcribed" counts each printed page separately and includes advertising pages that carry few or no directory entries. 1884 totals include the entries from other towns, but only Fort William and Port Arthur entries were turned into articles.

1950

The 1950 volume (Henderson's Directory of Fort William and Port Arthur, printed pages 97–661 transcribed) was scanned as a 704-page PDF.

• Pages: 704 scanned; 479 were transcribed as alphabetical directory pages, 261 in the Fort William section and 218 in the Port Arthur section.
• People: 34,219 person listings.
• Businesses and organisations: 2,083 business listings. That makes 36,302 items in all, plus 29 cross-references and unreadable fragments that were not treated as listings.
• Advertisements: 1,882 ad printings on 691 page images, 628 distinct ads (21 with pictures), placed on 511 business articles.
• On the wiki: 32,126 person articles, 1,979 business and organisation articles and 1,418 disambiguation pages were created, and 923 existing person articles and 18 business articles were updated, all finished on 28 October 2026. 36,841 pages are now in Category:Henderson's Directory 1950 (this also includes pages from earlier test runs, employer stubs and merges).
• Left to do: 760 records (678 people and 82 businesses) came back from the transcription with no text and were never ingested; they need to be re-read. The matcher also recorded 8,888 uncertain possible matches (a listing that might be a person already on the wiki) that were deliberately left unmerged.

1920

The 1920 volume (printed pages 126–405 transcribed) was scanned as a 229-page PDF, with two printed pages to each scanned page in the directory section.

• Pages: 229 scanned; 108 scanned pages (216 printed pages) were transcribed, 61 in the Fort William section and 47 in the Port Arthur section.
• People: 15,968 person listings.
• Businesses and organisations: 1,368 business listings; 17,336 items in all, plus 425 unreadable page-edge fragments and cross-references, and 90 lines with no classification, none of which were treated as listings.
• Advertisements: 1,773 ad printings on 406 page images, 600 distinct ads (36 with pictures), placed on 421 business articles.
• On the wiki: 15,395 person articles, 1,163 business articles and 261 disambiguation pages were created, and 174 person articles and 192 business articles were updated, finished on 28 October 2026. 17,048 pages are in Category:Henderson's Directory 1920.
• Left to do: 79 records (66 people, 13 businesses) came back with no text; 1 page creation failed and has not been retried; and 2,330 uncertain possible matches were recorded and left unmerged.

Photographed volumes (1884, 1907, 1913–14)

Four further books were photographed page by page, then transcribed by an AI vision model, so some misreadings are expected. They are fragments rather than whole books (for example, the 1913–14 photographs cover only parts of the alphabet for each city). The wiki ingests them with the same method as 1950 and 1920. All four were uploaded by 29 October 2026, followed by a clean-up pass: a person printed more than once in the same book (in the alphabetical list, the classified business section or a list of officials, or on a page that was photographed twice) now has one article with one row, and the extra pages were turned into redirects; widows ("wid George") are linked to a stub for the late husband; and people of the same surname at the same address are linked as a household.

• 1884 North West Gazetteer: 38 photos covering printed pages 222–322; 1,499 person and 294 business listings transcribed (Fort William and Port Arthur only were ingested). 1,363 person articles and 232 business articles created; 32 existing articles updated; 54 duplicate pages merged into redirects; 63 people linked to a household.
• 1907 Fort William: 38 photos (printed pages 4–85); 4,340 person and 548 business listings. 4,035 person articles, 206 business articles and 36 stubs for widows' late husbands created; 265 existing articles updated; 138 duplicate pages merged into redirects; 36 widows linked to their late husbands; 1,395 people linked to a household.
• 1907 Port Arthur: 52 photos (printed pages 152–243); 4,488 person and 689 business listings. 4,034 person articles, 255 business articles and 29 late-husband stubs created; 161 existing articles updated; 314 duplicate pages merged into redirects; 29 widows linked; 2,008 people linked to a household.
• 1913–14 Twin Cities, Vol. VI: 47 photos (printed pages 422–484); 2,823 person and 232 business listings. Repeated listings were combined before upload (71 repeat listings folded into one article each). 2,538 person articles, 92 business articles and 31 late-husband stubs created; 269 existing articles updated; 35 widows linked; 700 people linked to a household.
• Advertisements (photographed books): 1884: 60 ad printings, 44 distinct (2 with pictures); 1907 Fort William: 126 ad printings, 93 distinct (3 with pictures); 1907 Port Arthur: 124 ad printings, 76 distinct (5 with pictures); 1913–14: 204 ad printings, 142 distinct (1 with pictures).
• 334 further stub articles were created for employers and organisations named in the photo books.
• Not yet done: the advertisements in these books are being transcribed next, and 279 listings that came back from the transcription with no text still need to be re-read.
• 1,688 pages are in Category:Henderson's Directory 1884, 9,195 in Category:Henderson's Directory 1907 and 3,042 in Category:Henderson's Directory 1913.

These figures change while the uploads run; they describe the state on 29 October 2026.

How the listings are used on this wiki

• Each person listed gets a person article that opens with a sentence about who they were (for example, their job and the city they lived in), followed by a sortable Directory listings table with one row for each year they appear, using {{Directory listing}}. Businesses use {{Business listing}} in the same way.
• Where the listing matches a person who already has an article, the row is added to that article; the existing text is not rewritten. To avoid merging different people, common surnames are treated cautiously and uncertain pairs are left separate.
• Employers and other organisations each get their own stub article, and the people who worked there are linked from it.
• Pages from the 1950 and 1920 volumes were rewritten into this structure on 28–29 October 2026. In all, 49,724 of the 54,059 pages were converted; 4,058 needed no change; 133 pages edited by hand were left alone; and 144 pages failed (timeouts or an unrecognised page type) and are waiting for a retry. A further 2,392 bot-created pages were merged into existing hand-written articles about people with rare surnames.
• People who may still be alive are placed in Category:Living persons and, if from Thunder Bay, Category:Thunder Bay people.

Using the directories

Spellings of names and streets vary from year to year, abbreviations are heavy (for example "r" for rooms or resides and "h" for house), and the transcription here was done by machine, so check the printed page given in each citation before relying on a detail. A person's absence from a volume does not mean they were not in the city.

Where to find the originals

• The Thunder Bay Public Library's Brodie Resource Library holds Henderson's city directories for the area on microfilm, from 1884 to 2004. (The City of Thunder Bay Archives describes the same library collection as running from 1907 to 2004.)
• A 1963 Henderson's Twin Cities Fort William and Port Arthur Directory can be read online at FamilySearch.
• Winnipeg's Henderson's directories from 1880 to 1965 are online through the Winnipeg Public Library and the University of Alberta's Peel's Prairie Provinces.

See also

• Curriepedia:Data sources to ingest, the list of sources already ingested and still to do
• Case's Directory of Fort William, Port Arthur and the District of Thunder Bay
• Fort William City Directory, Twin Cities Directory and Henderson Directories Limited, the wiki's entries for individual directory titles and the publisher as they were listed
• Thunder Bay Public Library