The Hallmark Society was formed in 1973 in response to the rampant destruction of heritage buildings in the name of "progress". A small office was opened shortly afterward to collect material on historic buildings and the process of preservation. The collection has grown from a few documents and images to a comprehensive archives containing information on over 15,000 buildings and other heritage sites in the Capital Regional District.
This project involved the digitization of all of the photographs in our archival collection. Many of these were taken during early surveys of heritage structures in the Greater Victoria area in a project by the University of Victoria in the 1960s and 1970s. Hallmark Society was made the repository of the information shortly after the first office was opened. In many cases, they are the only publicly accessible images of heritage buildings before unsympathetic modifications were made and are very useful or restoration projects.
During the summer of 2009, our summer student scanned all the images and prepared a database with relevant information.
Funds to complete this work were received from the British Columbia History Digitization Program sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia and the Canada Summer Jobs initiative of Service Canada.
Currently, our summer 2010 student, Doug Cox, is updating the databases and website to include previous newsletters in full text and historical references from the Islander Newspaper.
If you find incorrect information on this site or can offer additional facts, please let us know. Much of the data was collected over 40 years ago, so its accuracy may be in question. We would also like to corect typographical errors and/or missing information. We will continually update the site to make it as accurate as possible.
If you wish higher quality images for publication, send us a message containing the address and name of the image and your contact information. We will normally reply within a week with costs and a delivery date.