Phone Books SCHOOL REGISTER

These surprisingly rich records date back to the late 19th century

Now that everybody has their own mobile phone, it’s easy to neglect this extremely important 20th-century source

The first public telephone exchange opened in the UK in 1879. Telephones books were first published in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. In the UK, the very first telephone directory was published in 1880 in London.

Phone books share some similarities with trade directories in that they were published every one to two years. The entries provide individual

names (usually the head of the household) or the name of a business, along with the address and telephone

number. However, from around 1925, ancestors who may not have appeared in the directories did submit an entry for themselves in phone books. This is particularly helpful for post-1911 research, bearing in mind the lack of the 1921–1941 censuses.

Phone books are useful for searching for living relatives and for tracing forwards from where you have found ancestors in the censuses. Notably, if your relation owned a business, you may find their name or connected products in the advertisement section. This may provide further details about the location of the business, in addition to the services it offered. So phone books can help you with both residential and occupational family history research.

Ancestry has digitised a collection of phone books held by BT Archives. The database covers 1880–1984, with near full county coverage for England as well as substantial records for Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and can be searched at bit.ly/anc-phone.

School registers may not seem like an obvious census substitute, but records of national schools include names of working-class ancestors who are not found in directories or other sources. The Elementary Education Act established a national system of free, compulsory and non-religious elementary education for all children from 1870, and from 1880 every child aged 5-10 should have been attending school, although in practice this was not always the case.

Nevertheless, these records can pick up ancestors who slip through other records. They also help in identifying addresses that relations may have lived in between censuses. This can be particularly useful for tracing those forebears who regularly moved between rented accommodation in large urban areas between the censuses of 1881 and 1911.

Ancestry has the collection ‘London, England, School Admissions and Discharges, 1840–1911’ at ancestry.co.uk/search/ collections/1938, and Findmypast’s collection ‘National School Admission Registers & LogBooks 1870–1914’ at bit.ly/fmp-nationalschools covers 41 counties in England and Wales. The records include the full name, birthdate and admittance date of each child, as well as (usually) the father’s name. The locale in which the child lived is also recorded, often including the address. Sometimes the child’s previous/future schools are also entered.