City Directories can be great resources of information about Norfolk and the rest of the Southside cities. The older city directories list people living
in Norfolk and Portsmouth as well as local businesses. In most cases, the entries in these books give home, work, and spousal information.
The business and organizational entries frequently list their location and leadership. The directories are generally divided into four sections:
business advertisements, alphabetical listing of people and businesses, a reverse street directory, and a government or type of business directory.
These books are a great source with which to research your family, business, or even a building's history. The city directories were usually published
annually and contain the previous year's information. Example: A 1900 City Directory will contain 1899 listing information for the city. However, there are instances of
multi-year directories or, in rare cases, no directories published for a certain year.
Please check under the "Research Links" section of our website for guides on how to use a city directory and a listing of the local city directories we have
available for the cities of Southside Hampton Roads [Chesapeake, Norfolk (including South Norfolk & Berkley), Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach.].
The directories listed below are in Adobe's Portable Document Format. A free reader is available from Adobe at http://get.adobe.com/reader/. The file size of each directory is listed and large files may take several minutes to load, even with a fast connection.
We wish to thank Joan Dalis for her most generous donation that made this project possible. We also want to thank our friends from the Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach Public Library - Local History collections for all their work as we formed a collaboration to preserve our histories through digital format. We look forward to future phases of our digital collaboration.
These directories are solely for research purposes. Commercial reprints are prohibited.
