Families of British Home Children / British Child Migrants

BHC Advocate and Researcher, Lori Oschefski, whose website British Home Children in Canada strives to catalog Home Child information and Home stories, has obtained, and is sharing with other BHC researchers, digital copies of 50 Barnardo's Ups & Downs journals dated between 1895 and 1903.

If your BHC was a part of the Barnardo's system between those years, chances are that you will find a story, letter or even a photograph.  For those of us who's BHC was sent by a different sending agency, this generous gift is worth reading due to the vast amounts of information from the children themselves on what they did, where they went and how they fared in their placements (though obviously only positive information was published, it is still a chance for an "I was there" narrative.)

At this writing only about 10 of the magazines are uploaded to the site, but most should be available by February 29th, 2012.  Many thanks to Lori for all her hard work and kindness in sharing these with the BHC/BCM community.  Click HERE TO VIEW THE AVAILABLE PERIODICALS.

Member Lori Oschefski has created a petition to request the Canadian government help fund BHC descendants in their requests for records from Barnardo's and other agencies.

Click to SIGN THE PETITION

Why This Is Important

Approximately 125,000 children were forced to immigrate into Canada from Great Britain, between 1860 and 1939, many of them torn away from their parents and brothers and sisters. They are collectively known as The British Home Children. This seems like so long ago now, but many of their descendants are still to this day struggling to piece together their past family history. This isn’t simply idle curiosity, it is closure for many and a desperate attempt to gain a sense of belonging that most of us are fortunate enough to take for granted. Imagine how it must feel to have no idea of your past family history and where your roots truly belong and worst of all that you have or may have family members who don’t even know you exist.

Many of the Home Children were brought up to believe they were outcasts and less worthy than others in society. Some were treated as slave labour and suffered terrible abuse in the building and settling of early Canada.

It’s too late for most of them now, but not for their descendants who lobby Barnardo’s and other agencies in England for information about their parents and grandparents. The information is available but is costly and many families cannot afford to pay for their records. The British and Australian Government leaders have publicly and with great humility, apologized to the home children and to their descendants while the Canadian Government, to their deep shame, has not. This petition aims to gain your support to lobby the Government of Canada to, at the very least, offer a grant to the relatives of Home Children to enable them to pay Barnardo's and other agencies in England for their family information.

Please support us and make a real difference to the lives of many. 

Whilst the successful ship-owners, slave-traders, mill and factory proprietors, merchants, and entrepreneurs became ever more wealthy, powerful, and comfortable, those ordinary people of Liverpool who had generated that wealth were trapped in their poverty.

Large, Georgian town-houses that had been built in the Town-centre - before the great ‘Middle-Class exodus’, and the spacious mansions and villas of central Liverpool, all had cellars built into them for the domestic servants and household staff. However, once the merchants and their families had moved out, having sold their former homes to opportunistic landlords, the labouring classes moved in; often more than one family to each room, and paying rent for extremely poor and frequently overcrowded accommodations. After the upper floors had been filled with new tenants, the cellars soon filled up too: these properties became Liverpool's first slums.

The workers, who laboured on the dock and canal-sides, and in the factories and workshops; their families, and those of the mariners setting sail on frequent, long, and uncertain sea-voyages around the world, could not afford to leave the grimy, dark, and unhealthy heart of the Town.

They were trapped, in an increasingly over-crowded urban metropolis, finding themselves eking out their existences in squalor. Indeed, the census of 1789/90 noted that people were living in the cellars of buildings because there was not enough existing housing to meet demand. The same census reported that there were 1,728 occupied cellars, containing 6,788 people, which at that time was approximately 12% of the Town's population.