December 10, 2025
Librarians are a cautious bunch. How else to explain why those at the main branch of the Toronto Public Library have taken to hiding away the latest Toronto phone books from public view?
They are all on the open shelf, they will tell you. But they are not. The phone books on the open shelf go up to 2009 and no further.
At first the librarian deflected my specific request for more recent volumes, but my genealogist’s instinct told me I was being gaslighted. I asked again, more pointedly than before, if they had more recent volumes.
“What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to trace a missing person.”
“For what purpose?”
“To find their current whereabouts.”
After a bit more conversation of this type, the librarian finally admitted that yes, the library does indeed hold more recent volumes. They were generally not offered to patrons, however, because (according to her) there was a perception that they posed a challenge to modern standards of privacy. (In an earlier day, the prevailing Miss Grundy might have used the word “morality” instead.)
I countered that the books were already in the public domain by virtue of the fact that they had been published and massive numbers of copies circulated. I might have added that all listings were a matter of consent; without it, and numbers were unlisted.
Like a bootlegger pulling out a bottle of hootch from behind the counter, the kind, young librarian eventually opened a small drawer behind her and pulled out several thin directories from 2021 to 2023. Later, she helpfully offered to retrieve more books of recent vintage from a back “annex.”
True, the phone book has been on the endangered species list for decades, and, like the dinosaur and once-ubiquitous city directory, has now pretty much gone extinct. Those that remain are but thin shadows of their former incarnations. The remaining volumes, those we can coerce from drawers and their secret annex, are essentially the last of their breed.
Toronto’s first city directories appeared in the 1830s, shortly after the city’s founding, and were published annually until about 2001 when the final volumes appeared. The first phone books appeared in the 1870s, a few years after the telephone itself. By 1910, American and Canadian telephone books were tracking more than seven million numbers. Both resources were a gold mine for researchers.
TPL has fully digitalized the entire run of city directories and most (except when you get into more recent years) are freely available online. Ancestry, MyHeritage, the Internet Archives, FamilySearch and other websites now offer somewhere between 500 million and a billion searchable directory pages.
Both directories and phone books have declined precipitously since the turn of the 21st century. Phone books have persisted somewhat longer in many communities, but both fell off a cliff once the web and smartphones became universal.
Genealogists and local historians have gained enormously in terms of convenience and ease of use of these precious, digitized resources. But the fact that these powerful tools have been largely discontinued, leaves a gaping hole in our collective genealogical toolbox.
Sadly, the era of telephone books and city directories has irretrievably passed. In a society beset with massive telephone fraud, identity theft, robocalls and data-scraping bots, there is little public appetite for a single, central registry of cell phone numbers. That concept, except for private and guarded registries controlled by the government, is “gone with the wind.” ♦
