Standing beside history ............. a new story from the Together Trust

Outside the Town Hall ready to leave

Now there is something very powerful in being able to stand on the exact same spot as a group of people whose history you know something about.

We are outside the Town Hall in Albert Square and like countless others I have stood on those steps and never tire of being impressed by the entrance and the large open space beyond with the broad stone staircases and the carved and painted images which celebrate our municipal achievement.

Of course I have no idea about what the party of young people standing there in the May of 1914 thought or felt and to try and speculate would be idle and unhistorical.

But it is a good starting point for the latest blog from the Together Trust which focuses on the last groups to be migrated by the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refugue to Canada and the work done to monitor their well being.

Since 1870 sending some of our young people across the Atlantic was seen as a way of giving them fresh start.

It was a policy which some challenged at the time and many since have come to criticise.

The Manchester and Salford Boys’and Girls’ Refugue began sending children in their care from 1870 but stopped just before the outbreak of the Great War and I think they were the first agency to do so.

This weeks’ blog begins to explore some of the documentation that went with that migration focusing on the “emigration books that remain in the archive [and which] show reports for children up to the age of eighteen and sometimes beyond.“

All of which is an important tool in understanding what went on and by extension might well help with any one tracing their own relative who crossed the Atlantic.

At which point I will not steal any of the archivist’s thunder and instead point you towards the blog and leave you to do the rest.

Suffice to say that the report on 17 year old Alfred draws you in and shows just what there is on offer.

Picture; Emigration Party outside the ManchesterTown Hall, courtesy of the Together Trust, 

* Emigration during WW1, http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/