More than 11,000 of images of Toronto buildings online on TOBuilt

If your ancestors lived in Toronto, you will want to add TOBuilt, a Toronto building and structure database, to your genealogy research toolbox.

TOBuilt is a crowd-sourced database with information and images of 11,500 buildings and structures in Toronto on the Architectural Conservancy Ontario Toronto’s (ACOToronto) website.

Robert Krawczyk created TOBuilt in 2006 to answer the question, “Who built that building?,” and established the first 10,000 entries. ACOToronto acquired and relaunched the site in 2015, and it has grown ever since.

Neighbourhoods
The TOBuilt database can be easily searched for the streets and addresses where ancestors once lived in neighbourhoods throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

In Daily Commercial News, Don Proctor writes that TOBuilt “is proving to be a valuable research resource to architects, builders and consultants planning to add or renovate existing buildings.” What he neglected to mention, however, is that this database is also a good resource for genealogists.

As an added bonus, the location of the building on Google Maps is provided below the image of each building.

Churches and schools
Entering the word, church, in the Building Name category and selecting the former city, Scarborough — my old neighbourhood — allowed me to look at images of 27 churches.

While almost all of the photos are of buildings still standing today, I did find an image of a church that was demolished in the 1950s and whose foundation was used to build a new church.

Searches for school and collegiate showed photos of my elementary and high schools.

Widen the search
If your search produces zero results, widen the search by searching all neighbourhoods and just the street name.

In the case of my great-great-uncle Thomas Alfred Haire’s home at 81 Hazelton Avenue, an exact search for the address produced nothing. So, I widened the search to not include the street number. Since his house was semi-detached, the photo was indexed as “77-81 Hazelton Avenue,” which explains why my first search failed.

While the only information about the house is that it was built in 1881, I now know my relative and his family moved into it when it was 20 years old. I can also look at the other homes nearby to gain a better sense of his former neighbourhood.

To find the church Thomas Alfred Haire may have attended, I searched for church, in the Annex neighbourhood, and restricted the year built to less than 1901.

While I was unable to locate any photos of the home of my ever elusive great-great-great-uncle Alexander Brown Young at 464 King Street East, I did come across several images of the Francis Beale Buildings, built in 1855, at 399-403 King Street East, which is somewhat nearby.

Since I know Alexander lived on King Street in 1922, I narrowed the Year search by less than 1922. That showed me the buildings that were probably standing when he lived there. It gives me an idea of the buildings he probably walked by on a regular basis.

Resources
Take a look at the Resources tab for links to several more websites, such as old fire insurance maps, aerial photos, and the Toronto Public Library’s digital archive.