On tracking a lost Home Child across Canada

Detail from James Rogers' attestation papers, August 1915

Just as one door closes another opens.

It is a familiar enough experience and one that so often happens in the pursuit of family history.

Just when you think you have hit a brick wall something pops up.

And so it was with my great uncle Roger James Hall who was a British Home Child sent over in 1914 to Canada.

There he spent an unhappy year, failing to settle on any of the farms he was placed, receiving poor reports on his conduct and attitude and finally in the August of 1915 running away from the last placement to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

One of the farms he stayed at in New Brunswick, 2008

He changed his name, and lied about his age and his next of kin but seems unable to make a break with the past.

His four years were marred with brushes with authority and eventually to spells in military prison.

He was demobbed in 1919 in New Brunswick and may have settled in either British Columbia or Alberta and sometime after 1925 he disappeared.

We know that he had helped his sister get to Canada in that year and she must have kept in touch but seems lost to his family back here in Europe.

I tried a few avenues of research and was helped by colleagues in some of the BHC societies but he seemed to have done a good job of covering his tracks and I moved on to other research.

Extract from letter sent to the Middlemore home, February 1916

Occasionally I would go back and trawl  the archives.

I wandered over the Homesteader records for the west of Canada, received newspaper clippings
and was moved by the number of people who responded to my letters with suggestion, stories and even photogrpahs of the people he worked for back in 1915.

And then the trail would go cold.

But those doors have a habit of opening and after my cousin Chris from Ontario got in touch last week the search is on again.

Chris thinks we may have tracked him to the Prince of Wales Ranch in Alberta and the Colonel Belcher Hospital which is in Calgary, Alberta.

All of which is exciting stuff and with publication of the 1921 Canadian census the door is thrown wide open.

Well we shall see.

Pictures; Attestation papers from the collection of Andrew Simpson and picture of the farmhouse,  
Angela Faubert, 2008