13 August 2020

Another Canadian Genealogical Resource Needed

It was almost a new year tradition. Every January a plastic-wrapped package thumped down on my porch. Until about 2011. As they say, the book didn't have much of a plot but did it ever have a cast of characters! Now the White Pages, along with Yellow Pages which continued a bit longer is history. 

Perhaps finding yourself in a city far away you turned to the phone book wondering whether you'd discover any of the unusual surnames in your family tree. I did that while visiting my old home town in England, found a cousin, phoned up and visited him and his wife at their home later that day. The news I got was that the information I wanted was probably in old documents being fed to the fire as witnessed by the newly married bride. She said she'd been horrified, a feeling I much belatedly shared.

Published annually, telephone directories date back well over100 years. Nothing was more name intensive than the white pages, so it's surprising those old volumes aren't more available online for genealogy to help fill in the gaps between censuses. Civil death records may be embargoed but disappearance from white pages is a clue to death. Or it could be they moved, that's part of a person's history too.

Ancestry does have the Canadian Phone and Address Directories, 1995-2002 collection. There are no Canadian telephone directories on Findmypast or MyHeritage.

It's not online but the catalogue for Library and Archives Canada lists the promising:

Microfilmed directories : Bell Canada telephone historical collection = Annuaires sur microfilm : collection historique du téléphone de Bell Canada.

The physical description is: 488 microfilm reels : negative ; 16 mm + 2 reel indexes (37 cm)

It's dated 1981. With that number of reels, it must cover more than the publication year, but there's no indication which years.

The FamilySearch wiki https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Canada_Directories includes the information:

The Family History Library and some large public and academic libraries have Phonefiche (microfiche copies of recent telephone directories of metropolitan areas) for Quebec and Ontario. The Family History Library also has:

Canada Phone Book: The National Telephone Directory on CD-ROM. Ed. 4.5 for year 1997. Danvers, Mass.: Pro CD, c. 1992–96. (Family History Library compact disc no. 20.)

Major Canadian libraries have copies of telephone directories (Bell Canada) from 1878 to 1979, but these are not at the Family History Library.


2 comments:

Glenn W said...

Telephone directories at LAC. Yes, an incredible number of reels. I recall they are organized by city, town etc, there is an index and are (or were) located in the small reference room far east side of the 2nd floor (in the room beyond where the city directories are shelved). A good candidate for digitization?

Louis Kessler said...

Fortunately, there are a good number of Henderson Directories available.