On this edition
The Recovery
How a lifetime's scholarship was pulled back from the edge, and what this edition is — and honestly is not.
What was lost
The Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, 1800–1950 was the life's work of the architectural historian Robert G. Hill — a reference of record for who designed and built this country across a century and a half. It lived at a single web address.
After his death the domain's registration lapsed. It was bought by an online-gambling operator, which kept the scholarly pages online as a shell — useful to them only for the search-engine standing the name still carried. The work was intact but held hostage to a lapsed invoice, and one renewal away from disappearing entirely.
How it was recovered
Everything here was restored from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. For each architect, the most complete archived copy was located, its biography lifted from the page, and its text — citations, cross-references, and all — rebuilt faithfully. The result is 2,839 entries, together with the dictionary's introduction, methodology, abbreviations, acknowledgements, and five appendices.
Nothing was rewritten or embellished. Every entry records the exact archival snapshot it came from, so any reader can trace it back to the source.
What is here, and what is not
The text is, as far as the archive preserved it, complete. Images are a different matter: the dictionary was overwhelmingly a work of words, and of the few illustrations it ever carried, only 7 portraits survived in the archive. They are shown here as they were found — small, and all the more precious for it. Entries revised in the site's final months, and any illustration never crawled, could not be recovered from this source.
In whose memory
This edition claims no authorship. Every word of scholarship is Robert G. Hill's. It is republished here so that the record he kept for so long remains where it belongs — in public, and findable — and in gratitude for the work.