I know atlases and roadmaps were a lot more common, but from my understanding those give more of a broader view of a large area like major roads and stuff. If you needed to find a small subdivision or small road, how would you do that before the internet?
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Every home was delivered a Phone book each year. These phone books contained the name, address and phone number of each person who had a home phone. This was called the White Pages.
There was also the Yellow Pages. Which was similar to the White Pages except for businesses. Businesses paid for these listings.
These gave you the address of places in the area the phone book covered.
On top of the White and Yellow pages these Phone books also contained maps of the area the Phone book covered. Once you know the street you need to head to it was just a matter of looking up that street name in the index of the maps and it told you what map to look at on Page X.
So the most common way people would find address were to look it up in the phone book and head to the map section and find the road they needed to travel to. So you then plotted out your route to get you to that road.
You could also buy complete maps of pretty much everywhere. These contained every road that was there when the current map was made. You could find these all over but just stopping at a gas stations or convenience stores, along with many other stores, in the area you were at was the easiest place to purchase one. These maps really weren’t any different that something like Google Maps, except they covered much smaller areas instead of everywhere.
You might not know exactly where to turn onto a street, but if you know the address it isn’t too hard to look at the posted addresses on any two building and see which way you needed to go to find the address. So if you saw address 123 followed by 125, moving in the direction you were traveling and needed to get to the address 324, you knew you needed to continue heading in the direction you were going until you found the building you were heading to, on the opposite side of the street, as odd addresses are on one side and even addresses are on the other(at least in the US).
If you were traveling a long distance, to say a city in a different state, you would start with an atlas and plot out the major roads you needed to travel to get you to the general area you were heading to. Then you would look at a local map of that area and find the street you needed to head to and plot a route from where you are to the road you needed. Then it was just a matter of looking at the addresses on the street and heading in the direction that would take you to the building you needed to get to.
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