Oak Bay Local

The Oak Bay house detective

Who lived in your house before you?

Oak Bay wrote down every house it allowed from 1908: owner, builder, rooms, cost. The ledger is free to download. Here is how to find yours in an afternoon, and where the trail goes next.

Oak Bay Local · Sources checked November 2, 2026 · 12 min read

Cutaway drawing of a two-storey Oak Bay Arts and Crafts house showing a 1912 family, a wartime blackout room, a 1950s kitchen and a present-day owner reading an old ledger, with a Garry oak and Mount Baker behind.
One house, four eras. Oak Bay Local illustration.

On September 19, 1908, Oak Bay issued its first building permit. It went to E. J. Hearn, for a $3,000 house on what is now Foul Bay Road. A clerk wrote it into a ledger, and kept writing for the next sixty years.

Those ledgers survived. A volunteer at the Oak Bay Archives, Paul Maurenbrecher, typed every permit up to the end of 1964 into a spreadsheet: owner, builder, materials, storeys, rooms and what it was expected to cost. He added 214 houses that were already standing before permits began. The file is free. Most people in Oak Bay have never opened it.

If your house is older than 1965, your house is almost certainly in it. That one row is the thread. Pull it and you can usually name the first family, the builder, every family after, and sometimes find the original floor plan and a photograph. Here is the route, in the order that saves the most time.

What the ledger shows

1912: the year Oak Bay built 351 houses

Count the new-house permits by year and a story jumps out. A village of a few dozen permits a year went to 150 in 1911 and 351 in 1912. Then the land boom broke, the war came, and by 1917 Oak Bay permitted five new houses all year.

  1. 19089
  2. 190931
  3. 191037
  4. 1911150
  5. 1912351
  6. 1913196
  7. 191462
  8. 19159
  9. 19168
  10. 19175
New-house permits per year. Our count from the Oak Bay Archives’ Building Permits Index, counting permits whose purpose is a dwelling, not additions or alterations.

It took until 1940 and 1941 for Oak Bay to build at that pace again, with 177 and 181 house permits. So if you live in an older house here, the odds favour one of two decades.

Hampshire Road had more new-house permits in 1912 than any other street, with 29. The most expensive that year was $25,000 for J. W. Morris, at what is now 1558 Beach Drive: twelve rooms, permit No. 502. A typical 1912 house was estimated at $2,700. About one in seven of those 351 houses is marked in the index as demolished.

1Find your house in the 1908 ledger

Download the Building Permits Index sorted by address (an Excel file). There is also a version sorted by date, and the archives explain the columns on its index page.

Find your street and number. The index uses today’s addresses, and gives the address the clerk actually wrote beside it. Streets were renamed and renumbered, so that second column matters later when you search old newspapers and directories.

If your house shows permit “0”, it was there before permits began in 1908. The index has 214 of those.

What you will usually get: permit number and date, owner, builder, materials, storeys, rooms, estimated cost, and the legal description (section, map, block, lot). What you will not get from the ledger is the architect. Clerks never wrote it down. Where the index names one, a volunteer found it elsewhere.

2Read the original handwritten page

The archives photographed the ledgers. Find your permit number and open the matching book on Flickr:

The handwritten page sometimes carries things the spreadsheet left out, like plumbing and sewer entries. Later permits for the same address are worth reading too. They are how you meet the owners who came after: a new garage, a sun porch, and at Tod House on Heron Street, a $24 air-raid shelter in 1942.

3Name every resident, year by year

City directories list who lived at each address, year by year. The Vancouver Public Library has B.C. directories from 1860 to 1955 free online, and Victoria’s include Oak Bay.

Pick a year, open the directory, and go to the street section. In the 1912 Henderson’s, look under “Victoria Streets”; it marks streets in Oak Bay Municipality. Find your street, read the name at your number, then look that name up in the alphabetical section for their job and employer.

Work backwards a year at a time until your house disappears. That is your build window. Use the old address from step one for the early years, because the numbers you know now may not exist yet. After 1955, the Oak Bay Archives has print directories to 1998.

For whole households, the free viHistory census database covers Vancouver Island to 1911. Library and Archives Canada has later censuses to 1931. Births, marriages and deaths are in the Royal BC Museum genealogy search.

4Search the Colonist for the address

Victoria’s Daily Colonist is digitized from 1858 to 1980 at britishcolonist.ca, free. Search the owner’s name with “Oak Bay”, and the old street name and number. Papers of the day printed permit lists, sales, weddings, parties and funerals, often with the house named.

The same papers, and the Victoria Daily Times to 1940, are on the Internet Archive. The archives’ tip: choose “search text”, not the default, and open the page even when a hit looks doubtful. The text recognition misses a lot.

5Book an hour at the Oak Bay Archives

The Oak Bay Archives is in the lower level of Municipal Hall, 2167 Oak Bay Avenue. It is open by appointment on Tuesdays and Fridays, 9:30 to 4, with drop-in hours on Tuesdays, 10 to 1. Call 250-598-3290 or email archives@oakbay.ca.

Ask for three things:

  • The appraisal card. Oak Bay kept a tax card for most houses until 1974. It usually shows the construction date, builder, additions, a floor plan and an exterior photograph.
  • The building file, if your house has one. There are files on more than 200 Oak Bay homes.
  • The fire insurance plan, from 1925 with updates to 1950. It shows your house’s footprint, materials and outbuildings.

Their own family and house history guide lists everything else, including assessment rolls from 1907 and 1912.

Planning a trip to the BC Archives? It closes on November 22, 2026 to move to Colwood, and reopens by appointment in spring 2027. Its online records stay up.

6Ask the hall for your house’s plans

Plans for existing houses are held by Oak Bay’s Community Building and Planning department, not the archives. The district lists building plans as routine release, meaning no freedom-of-information request. Email planning@oakbay.ca with the address.

7Trace every owner through land title

The ledger gives you the first owner. Land title gives you every owner. Find your parcel ID free on BC Assessment, then order the current title through LTSA Explorer. The government fee is $11.06 plus a service charge.

Each title names the one before it, but older cancelled titles are not online. Those are in the land title vault in Victoria, by appointment at 1-877-577-5872, or you can hire a title researcher. Non-commercial historical researchers can ask LTSA about an exemption from image fees.

8Turned 100? Mark it

The Oak Bay Heritage Foundation makes bronze Century House plaques for houses 100 years or older. Email oakbayheritagefdn@gmail.com with “Century Plaque”, your address and the build date. Their last published price sheet, from 2023, said $150; ask for the current price.

Any house built in 1926 or earlier qualifies, which, if the ledger is any guide, is a lot of Oak Bay.

How we checked: we downloaded the Oak Bay Archives’ Building Permits Index (updated June 16, 2026) and counted the permits ourselves. Every other fact links to the source we read on November 2, 2026. Hours and fees change, so confirm before a visit.