Presentation Review: Simcoe Reformer 2016

Simcoe ReformerApology would help families: author

Daniel R. PearceBy Daniel R. Pearce, Simcoe Reformer

Toronto author Sandra Joyce spoke at the Eva Brook Donly Museum on Jan. 28, 2016 about British Home Children, the orphans brought to Canada to work on farms. (DANIEL R. PEARCE/Simcoe Reformer)

A Toronto author who has written about British Home Children – orphans brought to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th Century to work on farms – is calling for Ottawa to apologize for allowing the practice.

“An apology is important because it would lead to the reunification of families,” said Sandra Joyce, who has penned three historic-fiction books on the topic.

An official statement from the prime minister would shine a light on the story of the 100,000 children who were brought here from orphanages, said Joyce, who spoke at the Eva Brook Donly Museum on Jan. 28.

That would in turn get descendants of home children thinking and to start looking for lost relatives, she said after speaking to a crowd of about 25 people, some of them descendants of home children.

Joyce didn’t know her father was a home child until after he died. It was during a visit to Pier 21 in Halifax, the point of entry for immigrants to Canada in the 20th Century, that she discovered her dad and his brother had been sent here from an orphanage.

She and her sister did more research and discovered, and visited, long-lost cousins in Scotland while also learning more about her father’s back story.

He had been given up because his father was in the poorhouse while his mother had separated from his father and had “lost interest” in her children, according to the documents they found.

Joyce is a co-founder of an organization known as the British Home Children Group International, which is lobbying for the apology. Four proposed bills have been tabled in the House of Commons but nothing has passed so far, she said.

Life for home children was a mixed bag of experiences, Joyce said. Some were treated well and were made part of the families they lived with. Others had “horrific” experiences.

“The large majority,” she said, “were in the middle, like my dad. My dad was not seen as a child. He was seen as a worker.

“He was not allowed to eat with the family. He was not allowed to speak to the other children. He ran away from three different farms.”

Joyce said her research explained a lot about her father. He didn’t like Scotland, and she could never figure out why.

If the issue of home children had been made public and taught in schools, “may be he would not have been such a reclusive person,” she said. “He was so distant. Maybe we would have had a better relationship. I always felt something was missing, maybe I did something wrong.”

Joyce has researched in detail how the system of home children worked. They were taken to “receiving” and “distribution homes” in Canada before being sent to farms. Her father went to one in Brockville. (One was located in the northwest corner of Norfolk County, said Mary Caughill, chair of the Norfolk Heritage Committee).

“You could order them and could return them if they were not suitable,” said Joyce. “They were kind of like products they could buy and sell.”

Home children are an important part of Canadian history, she said. About 3.5 million Canadians are descended from them or about 10 per cent of the population, she noted.

Daniel R. Pearce

519-426-3528 ext. 529132

daniel.pearce@sunmedia.ca

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Presentation review Aurora 2015

AHS Speaker Series: British Home Children

This scheme started during the Industrial Revolution, when more and more British families were moving to more urban areas to find work, and leaving behind the traditional practice of living near their families. This meant when they fell on hard times, there were no relatives nearby to help with the children. In response to this, organizations were created around the country with the intention of taking in these children to care for them. These homes quickly became over-crowded and the ‘never turn a child away’ policy of many of these homes became harder and harder to maintain. It was then that they turned to large scale child migration as the solution. Canada, and other countries in the British Empire, needed workers to help with farming across the country. This was seen as a solution to both issues.

Aurora 2Often bringing children to an institution was meant to be a temporary solution for parents, who intended to return for them, however, when parents returned, they were told that their children had already sailed. Some institutions would send out a notice beforehand informing the parents that their child would be leaving, others sent an ‘After Sailing’ notice informing them that they were already gone, many sent no notice at all.

The children were shipped in large numbers across the ocean and once arriving in Canada, they were taken into receiving homes. From there, they would be sent to farms and homes who had sent in successful applications. Siblings were often separated and the conditions for these children was very poor as they were typically seen as cheap labour, rather than children.

For Sandra and Karen, this story hit closer to home, as Sandra told the story of discovering that her father was a British Home Child and Karen shared her husband’s family’s story of taking in a British Home Child and seeing him as one of the family.

It is estimated that one in ten Canadians is a descendant from a British Home Child. Five members of the audience at Hilliary House knew of ancestors who came to Canada this way, and Karen shared methods of how others could find out.

For more information on this topic, Sandra’s book, The Street Arab is now on sale in the Hillary House gift shop for $24 or can be obtained from her website: www.sandrajoyce.com

 

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Novel Probes Story Of Home Children

Omar Mosleh
Town Crier

When author Sandra Joyce first learned that her grandmother had effectively orphaned her father and sent him to live in Canada from Britain because she “lost interest”, she was profoundly disturbed.

But when she did more research into the story of home children, who were sent to Commonwealth countries from Britain to alleviate a labour shortage, she had mixed emotions. (more…)

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