R.I.P historynerd.ca (2013-2026)
This marks the end of historynerd.ca (formerly known as The Margins of History).
historynerd.ca?
I started historynerd.ca in 2013 because I had just finished a degree in public policy and was looking for work (but wanting to continue with school), getting divorced, and trying to spend less time in the house, so was walking around the neighbourhood a whole lot. I had a little time on my hands and had become a little unmoored.
In other words, it was the perfect time for a neurodiverse closeted transsexual woman to throw herself into a new hobby! Preferably one that involved spending lots of time on the internet, in libraries, and in archives looking for very minor details on topics of ultimately little actual importance!
When it was active, I really enjoyed my time running the site and writing stories about those little things in Ottawa that you might have noticed and wondered about too.
By 2018 or 2019, however, I began to wear out. I was overwhelmed with life and getting pretty tired of a precarious existence. So when I was offered an opportunity for more stability in my life, I took it.
I also became less and less interested in blogging about a city (that never really seems to love anybody back) and was more interested in my first passion: making photos on film.
So in part, I kept the website online just in case it might actually be useful to some people, and in part to create the apprehension of continuity for those who knew who was behind the site while I was building up the courage to come out.
The last update was January 11, 2020, and even that capped off a year of mostly putting up transcripts from the commission that created the RMOC. I think there was one honest-to-goodness blog post in 2019 about a very controversial early pay telephone ("nickel-in-the-slot") in an apartment building on Elgin Street.
In the years since, I kept paying for hosting, paying for domain renewal, and occasionally changing the wordpress theme for fun.
Once I got my domain renewal notice for 2026, however, my first thought was "I don't want to pay for that anymore", followed by "I don't need to keep it online. I haven't updated it in years!", and "If anybody wants to refer to it, the site has probably been saved by archive.org like dozens of times!"
So this morning, I cancelled the hosting and set the domain be allowed to expire.
As of February 9, 2026, historynerd.ca should no longer resolve.
So, has historynerd.ca been archived?
Oh gosh, yes!
Archive.org's Wayback Machine saved the site more than 160 times across the 13 years it was online and all the hits and misses (I'm equally cursed and blessed, it seems) have been saved in all their glories. From the looks of it, their crawlers really stepped up archiving of the site in 2024 and 2025, so everything should be present and accounted for.
Although I took great care to make things as accurate and backed by evidence as I possibly could, I would still only ever use anything there as a good starting point to investigate further if you're looking for something serious.
January 9, 2026