Four million Canadians

are descendants of an estimated 100,000 orphaned and abandoned children sent by British care agencies to Canada between 1869 and 1939. Researching a "Home Child of Canada" is described in the Nov/Dec issue of Family Chronicle. At least 200,000 are descendants of Scottish orphans. Go to www.collectionscanada.ca to begin a search, if your grandparents or great grandparents were British child immigrants to Canada. From there go to immigration and citizenship, and eventually you'll get to home children (scroll down) which is divided into databases by years. Just reading the story in Family Chronicle brought tears to my eyes. It seems in every generation there is a social theory that comes to the forefront on what to do with unwanted or inconvenient children. Afterall, many of these children were street urchins before taken off the streets by various agencies and homes. Bonding them out as servants (some were adopted, however) seems cruel by today's standards, but not when compared to abortion of the unwanted or letting them wander the streets of industrial cities.

The article also includes websites for various British Home children's stories and accounts, such as Tweetybird, Marjorie Kohli, Perry Snow, Annie MacPerson, Maria Rye, Louisa Birt, Dr. Barnardo, Quarrier, Middlemore, Fegan, and Church of England and Roman Catholic. In many ways, if you are searching for a lost history, you are better off with this system because of ship records, medical records, and institutional records, than you are with the closed adoptions of the 1960s-1980s which deny adults any information not only about their own past, but their ancestors too.

If your library doesn't carry this journal, you can probably get a copy of the article on interlibrary loan. "Home children--British child immigrants to Canada," by Janice Nickerson, Family Chronicle, Vol. 12, no. 2, Nov/Dec, 2007, pp.16-19. The magazine's website said it does not sell back issues.