British Home Children Descendants .............. a place to search for children sent to Canada

Yesterday I took another step in the rehabilitation of my great uncle. I never knew him and until recently he was just a name on a birth certificate and a sentence in a letter from his sister written over 40 years ago.

We didn’t even know of his existence until I began looking into my mother’s family. But there he was, born in 1898 and sent en to Canada in 1914. He was a British Home Child, just one of the 100,000sent to start a new life.
I had discovered some of his early life from documents in Birmingham and Derby and from the Library and Archive, Canada.

And yesterday I entered him on the data base of the British Home Children. This online organisation is dedicated to the children who were sent to Canada, and to their descendants. As well as the database there are stories about the children who were settled, and from their families. The site can be found at http://www.britishhomechildren.org/

Picture; passenger list of the ship which took my great uncle to Canada in the May of 1914 from the collection of Andrew Simpson