Greetings All. In my previous message I mentioned that Bill Hancock, editor of the Humboldt Journal, had written an article about British Home Children. Bill has forwarded that article to me and I copy it here for your interest. Bill has also forwarded to me an editorial which I will send in a different posting. We are happy that some people in the media are starting to take note of the plight of British Home Children and their descendants, and the Post 1901 Census issue. Our thanks go to Bill and to other journalists and editors that support our efforts to regain public access to Post 1901 Census records. Happy Hunting. Gordon A. Watts [email protected] Co-Chair, Canada Census Committee Port Coquitlam, BC http://globalgenealogy.com/Census en français http://globalgenealogy.com/Census/Index_f.htm Permission to forward without notice is granted. ======================================= by Bill Hancock Humboldt Journal editor [email protected] Research into family history has gained huge popularity in recent years and it is growing even more quickly with the use of Internet-based resources. For many Canadians, looking into their family trees has become an investigation into something about their pasts that they may have not known before or perhaps had only a suspicion. They are the descendants of Britain's Home Children. In the fall of 1869, a group of 76 girls became the first group of Home Children to be sent from Britain to places such as Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and mostly Canada. Most ended up here as indentured labourers and house servants. Some of the lucky ones found families that took them in and raised them as their own children; others suffered terrible physical and sexual abuse in their new Canadian homes. Over a period of 70 years about 100,000 of them landed in Canada thanks to the efforts of about 50 different agencies. Some were as young as six years old. It is now estimated that between 11 per cent and 15 per cent of all Canadians can trace their roots to one or more of the original Home Children. On August 19 last year, Parks Canada unveiled a plaque in Stratford, Ontario at the former home of Annie MacPherson, a woman known for placing some 8,000 Home Children throughout parts off Ontario. About 50 people were expected to attend the event, but over 1,000 showed up. Researchers now say there are millions of "lost" relatives of these children. Perry Snow, a clinical psychologist in Calgary who wrote a book about Home Children detailing his own personal search for answers about his father's origins, is one of the better-known researchers in the field. According to Snow, more than half of the children suffered from neglect or abuse in Canada, after being declared as moral refuse" in Britain. "Many were not allowed to go to school, nor provided with adequate food, clothing or shelter," he wrote. "They suffered a unique form of prejudice in Canada because of their presumed 'tainted' origins. They were ostracized and accused of being carriers of syphilis," he said. "They were unwanted in England and unwelcome in Canada." Many of the children had been born out of wedlock, or perhaps were living on the street. Others had been caught shoplifting and were deemed undesirable by the British, including a boy who stole a loaf of bread and was shipped off to Australia as a result. Many were taken away from their living relatives such as brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and even surviving parents, never to be reunited again. For those who are now researching their heritage, secrecy has been a problem. Not unlike war veterans, most of the Home Children themselves never spoke of their experiences, and various agencies, along with the Canadian and British governments, have been reluctant to release records. Regardless of the stonewalling, many researchers continue to press on in their quest for knowledge. Humboldt resident Jack Hayes received some small books when his mother passed away and it made him suspect that she had been one of the Home Children. One of them was a book about the Quarrier family, who had been major players in exporting children to Canada, and for Hayes it opened up an unknown chapter in his family's past. In 1906, a year after his grandfather died as a result of an injury he received at work, Hayes' mother and three of her sisters were placed in a home in Britain because their mother was unable to care for them. A year and a half later, in June of 1908, they were sent to Canada aboard the S.S. Ionian along with 72 other girls under the care of Pastor and Mrs. Findlay and Miss MacWilliam. Hayes' mother was seven years old, while her sisters were eight, nine and ten. All four girls ended up as indentured domestics and somehow they managed to stay in touch with each other even though it was difficult to accomplish. "Quite often, Home Children weren't allowed to have contact with their siblings," said Hayes. "I knew she came over and worked at various homes in Canada," said Hayes. He recalled that she had been placed in the home of a doctor, but ended up in a different home. He also remembers that she never wanted to visit another doctor, but that she was treated well by the second family. "My mother was one of the lucky ones," he said. "We assumed both her mother and her father were dead," he continued as he spoke of his mother's past. "We found out later that wasn't the situation at all." "A great many of them felt abandoned by their parents," he said, and many others were shipped to Canada without the consent of their parents. Once they arrived in Canada, names were often changed. "That made it much more difficult to be traced," he said. Fellow Humboldt resident Jim Warden is also researching his family history and has discovered that his father was one of the Home Children. His grandmother had been a house servant who became pregnant out of wedlock. She was sent to a hospital requiring sponsorship, so questions remain about who may have provided the support or if it had perhaps been the child's father. In either event, the boy ended up being sent away to Canada, and Warden has the S.S. Teutonic's ship's log showing that his father, whose name was misspelled "Ernest Wardon" in the documents, departed Liverpool as one of 1,257 passengers, including 198 children under the age of 16 and nine stowaways, on April 19, 1913 and arrived in Quebec on April 26 that same year. His early experiences in Canada are largely a mystery, but it appears to have been more than unpleasant. Warden's father was yet another of the Home Children who had a rough time when he arrived in Canada. "My Dad didn't talk about it very much at all," said Warden, who now makes extensive use of his computer to track down clues to his family's history. "My Dad pulled a plough when he was 11 years old," said Warden. He was not permitted to attend church, rarely went to school with the other kids, and there are hints that there was abuse from his Canadian "family." A mile down the road, another one of the Home Children was with a family that treated their new guest quite well, making it more frustrating for his father. Authorities were supposed to be checking up on the kids once a year to make sure they were treated well, but the bureaucrats often either never got around to it, the children were uncomfortable with speaking up, or they were not believed anyway. Evidence of bad memories showed in 1978. When Warden took his own children along with their grandfather to the original Ontario farm where he had first worked, his father refused to go past the gate into the yard. "It brought back horrible memories for him," said Warden. "He stood at he gate with tears in his eyes." Research activities have been picking up recently and Warden says the amount of information in the public realm is increasing. "There's even more available now than when I started a year ago," he said, adding that his wife Bernice also has connections to Home Children from that side of the family history. One problem being encountered by family members researching their own past is secrecy. British and Canadian governments have been reluctant to release information and census data even though it is now a century old. The level of frustration has even led to an ongoing battle to gain access to information from the 1901 Canadian census. Meanwhile, the British government attempted to release their 1901 census on the Internet in February, but the huge rush of inquiries caused the entire Internet site to crash. "They were overwhelmed by the number of inquiries," said Warden, whose research would be aided with access to that information. Canada said it would never release any of the 1901 census information, agreed Jack Hayes, but that has been misinterpreted as being permanently and including information that would be helpful in research. "All we're really interested in as genealogical researchers is to find out about our family members," he said. Names and locations of people at certain dates are the key elements family research, Warden agreed, and nobody usually needs anything other than that from a census. "They don't want anything else," he said. For the moment, thousands of Canadians continue to trace back in time and as researchers discover each tidbit of information it seems likely that more and more families will discover an unknown part of their family's past. "There's lots of people who don't know.lots of people who don't want to know," said Warden. Both he and Jack Hayes have said they are willing to help point others in the right direction if they want to do their own research.