20 September 2006
BT has linked up with the website ancestry.co.uk to launch over 100 years of phone books online.
People will now be able to trace phone books going back to 1880 thus making it easier to trace their family history.
All UK phone books up to 1984, when BT privatized, will be made available and feature more than 250 million entries.
To begin with, the 430 books for Greater London – which contain more than 72 million names – will be available on the website.
David Hay, BT archives, said: "Since their introduction in 1880, phone books have provided a unique snapshot of communities in Britain in a regular and familiar format, making them an ideal source for both family and social historians."
Among the famous names included in the records are Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Benjamin Britten, Ian Fleming, Sir Oswald Mosley and Sigmund Freud.
Josh Hanna, Ancestry.co.uk managing director, said: "The British phone books collection is an important and fascinating addition to our online records and provides family and social historians with unique twentieth century information which has been very difficult to find up until now."
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