Family history website Findmypast has announced a new collection of nearly 39,000 records of the ‘Home Children’ who were sent from Britain to Canada.
From 1869 to 1948, around 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada by charitable organisations. Around 12% were orphans, while others had living parents but came from children’s homes, workhouses or impoverished families. Some found loving homes, but many were victims of abuse or exploitation. Around four million people today are descended from former Home Children.
Findmypast has announced a new collection of Home Children records, launched in partnership with organisations including The National Archives, the British Library, Library and Archives Canada and Home Children Canada.
So far it consists of four collections – ‘Home Children Inspection Reports’, recording inspections of children’s foster homes in Canada between 1913 and 1932 (25,534 records); ‘Home Children Board of Guardian Records’, which record children in the workhouse system in England who were then sent to Canada (10,649 records); ‘Lancashire, Liverpool, Children Sent To Canada 1883-1925’, which consists of registers of children sent from Liverpool to Canada (466 records); and ‘Children’s Legislation Correspondence’, which consists of government correspondence around the passing of the 1908 Children’s Act (2062 records).
The first three collections have been indexed by name. All collections include digitised images of the original records. They are free to search although users will need to register for a Findmypast account. More collections will be added in the future.
Sarah Bush, Findmypast’s Managing Director, said: “We’re extremely proud to launch this groundbreaking new collection, which will allow millions more people to uncover the stories of their forced migrant ancestors. It’s an incredibly poignant and complex part of our Commonwealth history, and these records will shed light on the lives and experiences of the British Home children, which have so often been overlooked or concealed.”
