I’m looking through old phone directories from my area for genealogy reasons.
The directory archive for where I live is digitized thankfully up to 1967 and is set up like so:
Smith John A 1234 Apple St…Ha-1245
My questions are as follows:
I’m looking at the 1966 book, right. Now, a relative of mine sold their old house on March 3rd 1966, and their new residence (post sale) is already listed, which means this particular directory was probably printed after March. My questions are:
Around what time of year were phone directories for each year printed? How “current” was the info for any given year?
How was the data (IE addresses and such) collected?
How did the people making the directory find out where you lived?
Also, a secondary shorter set of questions. In the directories I have seen, the addresses and numbers go by last name, and the person usually listed is the head of household. Is there any way to cross reference an ADDRESS in these directories? Like say I want to find the name of someone who lived at the same address, at that same time, who would be listed separately (because their last name would differ - say for example, a person renting in another person’s house) - how would I find that?
That probably varies with different local phone companies, but the information would probably be fairly current up to within a couple months of publication.
Your address is a rather important bit of information for the phone company to have, given that they want to send you a bill every month.
The people making the directory are the phone company. They know everything.
The name is generally the name of the person on the phone bill.
You could pay to have an extra listing for another member of the household, if you wanted. Some phone companies, at certain times, allowed you to choose another name to list in place of the billing name.
So unless the person you wanted to look up had their own phone, paid for a listing, or the person who paid for the phone line wanted that other person’s name used, you aren’t going to find any additional listings.
The only way to cross-reference an address would be to start from page 1 and go through the book or to digitize your copy and then use OCR software to search.
Phone companies did have reverse directories, which weren’t distributed to the general public like the regular directories, but these were organized by phone number, not address.
This. My grandfather died in 1946, and my grandmother just kept on paying the phone bill for him. Hence, my grandmother was listed in the phone book as (fictional name), “Smith, John A” up until the 1990s, when she died. In fairness, she did not want her own female name in the phone book, to avoid obscene callers. She could have used her initials and surname, of course, but it was just easier to keep paying the bills, and not change the name.
When I was in high school, a few of my friends had their own phones, paid for by their parents. The phone book listing would say, “Smith, John A, 123 Fake Street” and on a line below that, indented, would be “Teenager’s Telephone.” It was a good way to get in touch with my friends without having to speak with their parents–though there was neither caller ID nor voicemail in those days, so it was hit-and-miss.
My grandfather, after moving out from my grandmother, lived with the woman he had cheated on her with for the past 4 years (1964-1968) They stayed together an additional five years, and he died only two years after their breakup.
I know where they lived - the address. I tried contacting the then-owner of the house they rented; the owner herself was in a retirement home and her son only recalled a “young couple” living with them in that period. My grandfather would’ve been in his late 40s-early 50s at that time. Dead end.
I know what she looked like, because he shot a home movie of her at the World’s Fair where they both worked.
I know that, at least in 1965 at the World’s Fair, she worked for Traveler’s Insurance, because in the film she’s wearing a Traveler’s Insurance uniform and he films her giving a tour.
I have his phone number from the early 1970s because he had an OTB telephone account and it has his phone number.
It’s frustrating having an address, a face, and even a place of employment (albeit at one time) without having a name to match.
If this woman is still alive, or if her daughter (who, from what he told my mother, he acted as a stepfather toward), they could be great sources of information about him as a man, or photos, or perhaps even films (maybe even with sound).
Some communities had “city directories” where you could search by address. Although I think these often used data from the phone company, so someone without an account might not have been included.
In the 1960s, I am going to assume that most such directories were printed by the telephone company, and they were printed on various schedules depending where they were.
The phone company had the data, since it owned the phones, it installed the phones and knew where, and it billed for them. This should also answer question#3. If you didn’t want your number published in the phone book, you paid extra and got an unlisted number. If you didn’t even want your phone listed in directory assistance, you paid even more extra and got an unpublished number. I know this sounds backwards, but that was the terminology the phone company used. But they usually only listed one name per address, and it would be the name of the person who called for the service.
They knew where you lived because they knew where they put the phone, and they knew what connections were necessary for the phone to work there., back in the days when all phone were landlines.
Almost every town had some version of what was called a criss-cross directory, which listed addresses. This was the phone company’s proprietary information, and not necessarily available to the general public. In some cases these were available to police departments, so maybe compiled by them or with them in mind. But sometimes libraries have copies of them, too. Obviously, the phone company could also look up the address for any number, but they wouldn’t do that for just anyone, and they probably won’t still have the information from 40 or 50 years ago.
Maybe a really small town wouldn’t have a criss-cross directory, but in a really small town it wouldn’t take so long to go through the phone book.
The other thing you might find helpful would be a city directory. Again, check your library. This would list all people living in the household. These were done by various private companies–not the phone company, there was usually only one phone company–and they would not be either as accurate or as up to date as the phone directory, as the information had to be collected and compiled. They did this, where I lived, by sending people door to door with their questions, and the information collected was not only who lived there, but what they did and where they worked. They stopped doing them some time in the '70s or '80s in my city, I think. People were under no obligation to answer the questions at all, or to answer them honestly. And they would come out probably almost a year after the information was collected, so again, not as up to date as the phone book.
I don’t know where you live, but I would suggest finding a library and asking. My experience is that librarians know how to do this kind of genealogical research, know where to point you to look, and they are happy to help.
There are services which could locate all the information available about a person based on name and address by searching all available public records. Unfortunately a lot of them are a fairly useless waste of money but some searching may reveal which are effective and can provide all the available information for a reasonable price. That may not help the OP though, he has already found a lot of information about his grandfather and there may not be much more in any public records.
Those directories were made available to anyone who wanted to pay the steep price, too much for a casual phone user, but OK for businesses like security firms (to call a neighbor in an emergency), credit checking firms (who would routinely canvas neighbors, looking for juicy titbits on a specific party), and others.
I found out about this in two instances. One, neighbors would tell me that they were contacted by a credit firm asking about my habits – did I stay out late, did I hold loud parties, did I seem like a good citizen or a satanic one. Two, when my phone was disconnected by my request prior to a household move, and the moving company needed to contact me during the move, they used the criss-cross directory to find the nearest neighbor and ask him to walk next door and tell me to call the company. Remember – this was before cellphones.
See if your area had directories, not just phone books. The ones in my area have separate listings by name, address and phone number. The publishers around here (Ohio) were Polk, Robinson and Page-Baldwin. They tend to be published more in rural areas.
Since there were no rural addresses until recently they have different systems to list people. Most just start at one end of the road and progressively number the houses as they come to them, and put N, S, E or W to indicate which side of the road they are on. One company uses actually mileage as the address in blocks of decimal miles, even numbers on the right, etc, which cities still do today.
The ones in the city use the assigned addresses, of course. Directories often have a bunch of other information: Spouse, employer, occupation, and number of residents under a certain age (older children get their name listed). Some even list what car they drive. A good directory is like a mini census.
The phone company used to charge a fee for a name change, and you didn’t even get a freebie for a death or marriage.
My parents used to have the phone listed way back when under my father’s name, and his students (college) would call him at home, so they changed the listing to my mother’s name, because the one-time fee for a name change was cheaper than the yearly fee for an unlisted number (yes, it used to cost money not to be listed in the phone book). My mother then got obscene calls a few times, so she changed the listing again to her initials. When she started teaching, apparently her students weren’t clever enough to think to look up her initials.
Beginning in the late 1980s, you could get two different numbers for the same phone line-- you didn’t need two physical lines coming into the house-- and the phone ring sounded different depending on which number someone dialed. I had two numbers, one for voice, and one for TTY. Since it was one line, not two, if someone answered one ring, the line was occupied, and you couldn’t call through on the other number. I knew people who had this set-up for their kids. The fee was only about a dollar a month.
However, I did know some people who actually had a separate physical line for their kids when I was in high school. The kids’ line could be occupied, and you could still call through on the other line. One person I knew was a doctor who had “Dr. Something” listed, and then the second line was listed as Something Family. I’m not sure how they got it listed like that, but the point wasn’t so much that the kids were spoiled with their own line, as that he was, IIRC, an ER doctor, who got paged a lot, and needed a phone available, and his family (he had IIRC, five kids) got tired of having to hang up every time he was paged-- that included his wife. When the kids moved out, they probably used the second line for the computer.
A lot of people had a second line put in in the 1990s for the computer. I’m not sure how that was listed.
ETA: I remember that in Indiana, the phone book came out in November. Don’t kn ow why I remember that.
I could try this. My grandfather doesn’t come up in every paid public records searches, nor in city directories on ancestry. He died in 1975. He seems to have wanted to go “under the radar” so to speak. The only way I know his address for certain was his girlfriend had written it on the back of a photograph of him taken in 1972. When he and his siblings sold a jointly owned property in early 1972, he chose not to give an address, simply stating he lived in (Such and Such) County, NY. I have his 1969 and 1972 Driver Licenses, and both of those have his address as the house he shared with my grandmother - which he would not have been living in in 1969 or 1972. His employer, a security firm, went out of business in 1996 or I would’ve tried to contact them. Even things like separation records (they never got divorced, only legally separated) I would have no access to - A fire recently wiped out most family court records over a hundred year span.
BTW, the licenses back then were pretty cool, and had better photographs than later ones. They were studio portraits you had to staple to the license. Later on, those 1980s and 1990s DMV photos taken on-site sucked in comparison - Very poor photographic quality. These look like mugshot-esque portraits in terms of photographic quality.
Here’s a duplicate (that he kept for whatever reason) of his May 1966 license photo:
to put a finer point on this, back then, you didn’t own your telephone. You couldn’t go to the department store, buy one, and plug it into a jack in the wall. AT&T had to send a guy out to bring you one and hardwire it to the phone lines running into your house. and, if there weren’t any, wire your house to the lines up on the utility pole.
if you had a “legal” phone, AT&T knew who you were.
