Social Register

Specific to the United States, the Social Register (SR) is a directory of names and addresses of prominent American families who are claimed to be from the social elite. Inclusion in the Social Register has historically been limited to members of polite society, members of the American upper class and The Establishment, and/or those of "old money" or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) families, within the Social Register cities. They are Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia,Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., as well as ones for "Southern Cities". In European countries, similar directories for the perceived upper class, such as Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry in the United Kingdom, have been published for centuries.

The social elite was a small closed group. The leadership was well known to the readers of society pages, but in larger cities it was impossible to remember everyone, or to keep track of the new debutantes, the marriages, and the obituaries. The solution was the Social Register, which listed the names and addresses of the families who mingled in the same private clubs, attended the right teas and cotillions, worshipped together at prestige churches, funded the proper charities, lived in exclusive neighborhoods, and sent their daughters to finishing schools and their sons away to prep schools.

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