All you ever wanted to know but never knew where to look .... an index of books on British Home Children

Even today when you tell people that 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada between 1870 and 1930, the usual response is surprise, followed by bewilderment and those simple questions of why and how?  

Of course here in Britain we have had a record of sending people out to other lands, whether it was as criminals from the 17th century, and settlers from the 19th or in the case of children to Canada and later Australia well into the 20th century.

Now there is some fine research being done, mainly in Canada, and a lot of serious work to help those who were sent as children to Australia as late as the 1970s to piece together their former lives but here in Britain there is still a deep chasm of ignorance.

Those who do pursue the topic are either a small band of historians or relatives who discover by accident that a parent or grandparent was settled in Canada.  In my case just over a year ago I made the connection between a great uncle and the British Home Child scheme which was responsible for the settlement of orphan and street children to former parts of the Empire.  My great uncle Roger was neither orphan nor homeless street child but one of those with a parent who the authorities deemed as “unfit to have control.”

When I first began researching his life and the BHC scheme I had little to go on, but with the help of people also on that search I found much that helped me.  And today many of these people I count as friends.  So perhaps this is the moment to refer to Lori who has collected together the biggest collection on the internet of books on British Home Children http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/book--article-library.html

Her site http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/ is a wealth of information, links and opinions which allow the researcher to lock into the growing interest and work on BHC.  Now at this point I should also mention other colleagues and friends as well as sites, but that would only distract for the moment from the task which is to highlight this index.

Picture’s from the collection of Lori Oschefski