Digital Ontario City Directories
About Digital Ontario City Directories
City directories are invaluable for researching information about a community at a given point in time - its residents, streets, buildings, organizations, industries and other services. Using city directories published over a series of years is helpful to document developments and changes in a place over time.
Because of their ease of use and value to so many researchers, city directories are popular for digitization. This page links to more than 1,000 digital Ontario city directories that were originally published between 1853 and 2013, which have been digitized by several organizations from the collections of libraries and archives across the province. The list is arranged alphabetically by community name.
Links to Toronto city directories in print and digital formats are provided on a separate page.
Community names
Many historical city directories for the province also listed surrounding counties and towns, but only places that were included on the title page of a directory are included here. "Community name" lists the main municipality covered in the directory; additional places are shown in the column "Locations listed on the title page". Separately published county directories that did not include the name of an Ontario city, town or village on the title page are not listed at this time.
Digital repository names - sources of digital directories
The collection of directories compiled here has been digitized by the organizations listed below. In some cases more than one organization has digitized the same directory for a given year; all digital copies are included.
- Canadiana Online - provides an in-browser tool to navigate through the pages of directories, but no downloads. With a subscription, searching the documents is possible.
- Internet Archive - provides a variety of file types for download, including PDF, EPUB, Kindle, among others. It also provides an in-browser tool for navigating the directory that allows easy flipping to a selected page. Several libraries in Ontario use Internet Archive to digitize their directory collections.
- Library and Archives Canada - provides searchable directories that can also be navigated in-browser. Select editions are available in PDF format, broken up into multiple parts.
- Our Ontario - a partnership with cultural and heritage organizations, such as libraries, that hosts digitized materials. Depending on the organization uploading this tool, PDFs are available for download. Otherwise, the website allows for searching through the documents in-browser.
- Public Libraries - some links come from local public libraries and their own digital content management systems:
Acknowledgements
This inventory was initially compiled for Toronto Public Library by Marta Boutchma, during a practicum for the Master's program, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. The work was supervised by staff at the Toronto Reference Library: Irene Lewycka, Services Specialist, Humanities and Social Sciences Department and Barbara Myrvold, Senior Services Specialist, Local History, Special Collections Department.
This is an ongoing project and we would appreciate hearing from you about additional digital Ontario city directories that we can add to our listings.