The Beach and East Toronto Historical Society Local History Index
This project documents the history of the Beach and East Toronto areas of the city, and is freely available through The Beach and East Toronto Society’s website.
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Screenshot of The Beach and East Toronto Historical Society [TBETHS] Local History Index spreadsheet, 2024 Heritage Toronto Public History Award nominee. Image by Barbara Myrvold.
TBTHS Local History Index Project Leads (from left) Irena Lewycka, Katherine Vice, and Barbara Myrvold, hold cards for automation, 2024 Heritage Toronto Public History Award nominee. Image by Barbara Myrvold.
Card catalog cabinet for the The Beach and East Toronto Historical Society [TBETHS] Local History Index, 2024 Heritage Toronto Public History Award nominee. Image by Barbara Myrvold.
Project Leads: Irena Lewycka, Barbara Myrvold, and Katherine Vice
Date of Release: July 14, 2023
The project automated a manual index documenting the history of the Toronto area, and made it freely available through The Beach and East Toronto Society’s website.
Originally created in the 1980s by the then-East Toronto and Beaches Historical Society, the Index was the main information resource that Mary Campbell and Barbara Myrvold used to prepare The Beach in Pictures (1988) and Historical Walking Tour of Kew Beach (1995). However, being housed in the Society’s Archives located in a private residence, the manual Index was publicly inaccessible except by telephone or appointment to a small number of researchers.
To increase access, the Society’s directors voted in 2019 to automate the Index and provide it without charge 24/7 on its website. Two dozen volunteers participated in the automation project, transcribing thousands of index entries into an electronic format.
TBETHS’s Local History Index provides information about people, organizations, places, and events within the Toronto area between Coxwell Avenue on the west, Victoria Park Avenue on the east, and from roughly Danforth Avenue on the north to Lake Ontario. It includes references to primary and secondary sources recording the archeological, built, cultural and natural heritage of several Toronto neighbourhoods.
The online Index has more than 11,350 records. Most of them were created between the 1880s and the 1910s, although the oldest is from 1791 and the newest is from 2021. More than 93 percent of the index entries are to newspaper articles and government records.
Each index entry includes bibliographic information as well as subjects, a description (contents summary), a link to an online record (where available) and the source (repository) of the item.
Additional Project Members:
TBETHS Card Index Automation Project Team, 2019-2023:
Yvonne Butorac, Mary Campbell, Glenn Chadwick, Ursula Eley, John Ellis, Norm Holman, Aaron Katzsch, Rob Kee, Janice Lavery, Irena Lewycka, Anne Livingston, Deborah Livingston-Lowe, Donna MacLeod, Sam Martin, Ann Menheere, Tom Middleton, Madeline Moscoe, Barbara Myrvold, Sheilah O’Connor, Andrea Orlick, Karen Pederson, Clyde Robinson, Rob Rohr, Molly Saunders, Andra Sheffer, Katherine Vice