Not many folks pay much attention to historic area codes and telephone exchanges. It's always a pain when your region sub-divides and suddenly you're in a new zone. But who keeps track of all those old zones and does it matter? Maybe the phone company, but I tend to doubt it. Monk is busy solving crime, so don't count on him jotting them down. Wikipedia has some useful basic information about the North American Numbering Plan, but nothing as detailed as is required for research of individual numbers.
So, let's say you come across a home phone number for a research interest in an address book from the early 1970's. The subject of interest had a 212 area code. So now at least you know he lived in Manhattan, right? Wrong. In those days, 212 area code also included Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
New Jersey's 201 area code was the first area code and belonged to the whole state until 609 was assigned to the southern portion of the state. After I moved to the fast-growing central portion of the state in the late 1970s, the need for new phone numbers for a burgeoning population prompted a geographic split and a change of my area code to 908. A need for most Americans to have lots of cell phones and faxes and extra lines resulted in yet another change in my household, to 732.
While my area code (XXX-xxx-xxxx) has changes several times over thirty years, my telephone exchange (xxx-XXX-xxxx) has stayed the same because I've not moved. Actually, even if I had moved from one side of town to the other, I might not have been required to change my number. That's because the exchange would have been the same.
If you check the front of many old White Pages, you will usually find a guide to local exchanges. This guide was provided by the phone company for billing purposes, so a customer could determine which neighborhoods were local calls and which were in-state long distance calls. But this information can also be useful for tagging a place to a phone number. If you have a phone number and a rough idea of when it was in use, you can often discern where that phone account was situated if you have the appropriate telephone directory handy.
But old White Pages are disappearing faster than the polar ice cap. They are bulky and no one needs old phone books anymore because we have CDs and the Internet, right? Public libraries can't afford to store the big books so I'm sure they are simply recycling them. You might be able to research an old name and get a listing, but try doing a bit of research on an old phone number. When you check your sources for former area codes and the location of particular phone exchanges, you will soon see there is little out there.
The issue reminds me of the break up of historic counties as the US expanded, especially in the 19th century. Just like the rapid change of area code boundaries, county borders were amended constantly over many years and I've yet to find the state that has prepared a handy dandy guide that quickly associates towns with their respective counties over time. Newberry's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries would be a promising contribution to our knowledge but it is seemingly very expensive, incomplete, out of print, and not readily available for free to the general public.
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4 comments:
Some libraries are archiving materials with area codes--like city directories. Not all cities have city directories, but they can be an excellent source of information. Ask your local librarian--maybe not for old phonebooks--but for the precise information you need--and see what happens. Even if your local library doesn't have your answer, the staff can contact a bigger library for more resources.
Thanks for the comment. I love to use the local library for reference services, including local history help and Inter-library Loans. As you say, a good reference librarian can provide all sorts of assistance and guidance. I've found that local librarians in far away places will usually try extra hard to be helpful, but I worry that they get lots of requests and are burdened with my questions, so I don't use their services as often as I might.
I've seen classic city directories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries but haven't come across many city directories in more recent times.
Since I'm located in the Washington, DC area (actually the Maryland suburbs, but within the local transit area) I have been able to look up old telephone books in the Library of Congress, which is open to the public (you have to get a researcher's ID card, but this is free to anyone who has a serious interest in doing research). They also have old city directories. Most of this stuff is on microfilm, so it doesn't crumble and you can easily look stuff up. I'm mostly interested in the old phone books to identify historical exchange names, but any of this stuff is available for whatever purpose.
I decided to take on this challenge. :)
I run WhereCall.com, a site that has lots of information about phone numbers and exchanges, so I have a lot of data at my disposal.
I have added an old phone number lookup page that lets you enter an old phone number, to find out where the phone number may have been located. I have more I want to add (e.g. a 'this phone number was valid as recently as [date]' option to narrow down the possibilities), but it should be helpful. Enjoy. :)
-Scott
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