Research Guides: United States: City and Telephone Directories: U.S. Telephone Directories (2024)

FAQs

Do they still publish city directories? ›

City directories are compiled through door-to-door surveys and are published at irregular intervals.

Depends on where, the Last British phone book was printed in March 2024, in the US they were phased out since 2010 (different date from state to state), in Germany it is published online only and so on.

City directories are basically a big address book for everyone living in a community. They were used before telephone books became available, but still were produced in addition to telephone books. A city directory contains much more information than a telephone book does.

You may be able to find old phone books from past decades in your area through online auction websites, local historical societies, or online archives of libraries or genealogy websites. You can also try contacting your local library or historical society to see if they have any resources available for public access.

Web directories, once tools for discovering websites in the early days of the Internet, have evolved over the past two decades. While the rise of Google led many to assume that web directories would become obsolete, plenty of these online catalogs have adapted to remain relevant.

Ancestry is home to an extensive collection of city and area directories. Directories typically contain entries for working family members and include name, occupation, and home and business addresses.

Your local chamber of commerce usually offers local phone books at no cost.

Believe it or not, the Yellow Pages and White Pages are still around today in some capacity. However, despite their long history, Yellow and White Pages are essentially irrelevant. The internet has taken over as the primary source for local information and businesses, eliminating the need for printed books.

Believe it or not, phone books are still around. More than 100,000 are distributed in the Philadelphia area alone. There was a time when phone books were an essential marketing channel to reach local audiences. Personal numbers were listed in the white pages.

In 2008, one of the only known surviving copies of the world's first telephone books sold at auction for over $170,000. The demise of the phone book began on Oct. 14, 2010, when regulators in New York approved Verizon's request to stop mass-printing residential phone books.

How do I get a local telephone directory? ›

Calling local 411 and/or national directory assistance (1. area code.

This led to Coy's establishing the world's first public telephone exchange on January 28, 1878. Three weeks later Coy made another first, by publishing the world's first telephone directory, a one-page list of 50 subscribers in New Haven.

Ushering in the demise of the phone book are the internet and mobile phones. With phone books being bulky and updated just once yearly, the regularly updated internet proved far more accurate and reliable. Meanwhile, a 2004 law stipulated that cell phone numbers may not be included in phone directories.

Collection Information

In the case of older telephone directories, these You may find street directories, lists of advertisements (which may include your ancestor's business), lists of government officials, charitable organizations, churches, cemeteries, hotels, maps, and much more.

In the USA, most people in towns, and most businesses, included their full address in phone books, when they were still published (area codes and zip codes were omitted). People on rural country roads might have their road but not the house number, or they might list only the rural community and no road at all.

Church directories have been an important part of churches' communication strategies for many years. While they've evolved over time, their purpose is still the same: to collect your members' information and organize it in a way that's easy to use.

Yes, directories are still effective, but not all of them. The truth is that most of the directories out there are spammy and of very low quality. You should stay away from those. However, quality directories are still valuable, and I've seen websites still ranking on the first pages, only with directories links.

City directories first appeared in the United States in 1785, and record the names, residential and business addresses, and occupations of millions of Americans.

Being an owner of a directory listing website, you had to collect leads and loads of leads. Although it took an awful lot of time, your leads can be monetized after a while. Lead selling is the safest option to monetize your directory listing website because you can make money while making no changes to your site.