THE BRITISH HOME CHILDREN

THE BRITISH CHILD EMIGRATION SCHEME TO CANADA (1870-1957)

100,000 British Home Children (alleged orphans) were sent to Canada by over 50 British Child Care organizations. These 4-15 year old children worked as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants until they were 18 years old. The British Child Care organizations professed a dominant motive of providing these children with a better life than they would have had in Britain, but they had other ignoble and pecuniary motives.

The organizations rid themselves of an unwanted segment of their society and profited when they sold these children to Canadian farmers. Siblings in care in Britain were separated from their families and each other. Siblings were separated from each other when they were sent to Canada. Most never saw each other again. Many spent their lives trying to identify their parents and find their siblings and most were unsuccessful.

The 4-5 million Canadian descendants of British Home Children have 20 million British Grandparents, Uncles, and Aunts. How could this many people not know they are related to one another? Their mutual searches have been hampered by the unwillingness of the childcare organizations to readily release vital personal information.

For the past 12 years, I've been collecting every bit of information I can about as many British Home Children as I can and storing this information in the British Home Children Registry. It is a comprehensive database of 57,000 British Home Children records – 5,000 who have been claimed by their descendants. It is the only multi-sending-organization database of its kind known to exist. It was designed to create an ongoing legacy to preserve BHC identities in perpetuity, and to help descendants restore their family ties so cruelly severed by the child care organizations.

I have identified nearly 5,000 boys who enlisted/died in WW1; thousands of BHC marriages; 400 children sent from the Isle of Man, 200 children who died while ‘in care’; 800 children who were informally ‘adopted’ by their ‘masters’; nearly a 100 BHC to BHC marriages.

This website contains only a partial listing of each child’s record in the BHC Registry. For a complete sample listing of a child’s record