Neither Waif Nor Stray: The Search for a Stolen IdentityMy Father became a ward of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society when he was four years old in 1913. When he was 15, they gave him the choice of emigrating to Australia or Canada. No one wanted him in England. They sent him to work on Canadian farms as an indentured farm labourer. He was part of the little-known British Child Emigration Scheme in which fifty child-care organizations emigrated 100,000 children to Canada between 1880-1930. An unknown number made their way to the United States. These alleged orphan children were between 6-15 years old and were known as The Home Children. The organizations professed a dominant motive of providing these children with better lives than what they might have had in England, but they had other ignoble motives. Half of these children suffered from child neglect and abuse. The scheme persisted interrupted only by WWI and WWII until the mid-1960s when these organizations sent 15,000 children to Australia, New Zealand, and Africa.
My Father never had a Birth Certificate. He had nothing to verify who he was for the first 33 years of his life. For the next 15 years, he carried a tattered To Whom it May Concern letter that stated his name and identified him as of British nationality. For the first half of his life, he had serious doubts if his surname was really Snow. He wondered if someone had simply invented it for him. When he was 48 years old, he obtained a Baptism Certificate that confirmed his name, identified his Mother, but not his Father. For the next 16 years, this was all he had for identification. When he was 64 years old, he received his Canadian Citizenship. He wrote to the Waifs and Strays Society for 55 years, but they withheld from him the vital information he so desperately sought. Why did they not want him to know who he was? I resumed his lifelong search following his death on his unconfirmed birthday in 1994. The Children's Society reluctantly released his 82-year-old case file to me. It took me four years to identify his Parents and locate his Family. Your ancestors may have been British Home Children. You may be one of the four million of Canada's "Invisible Immigrants." Your ancestor's stories do not appear in Canadian school curricula. The British childcare organizations deliberately severed the Home Children's familial ties. The four million descendants have a potential 20 million British relatives. If one purpose of the scheme was to simply rid Britain of an unwanted element of their society, they only partially succeeded. They underestimated the strength of needing to know who you are - to have an identity. I hope the successful conclusion of my search will inspire others to persist until they re-establish their familial ties. No one should live their lives without knowing who they are and to whom they belong. It is your birthright to know your heritage. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 50
... asked you to identify yourself , how would you answer ? Invariably , you would volunteer your name . Although many others might have the same name , it is the first step in identifying yourself apart from others . Next , you might tell ...
... asked her for any information she had , and she gave me a file of their correspondence with England . Until then , I was completely unaware of their attempts to establish his identity over a period of 55 years . My Father's past was ...
... asked me if he knew anything about electricity . I said , ' Not very much . ' I stood on a ladder and he told me to grab hold of a pipe . He handed an electrical wire to me . When I touched it , the shock nearly knocked me off . Mr ...
... asked to be removed . She was . Some , like Amy Norris , who came to Canada when she was 12 , were not kept in one place very long but were shunted from farm to farm all through childhood .... Whatever the reason , the frequent moving ...
... asked where I was going to work when I left the hospital and offered me a position as a Timekeeper . I had to write and type with my left hand ( Snow G. 11 ) . You are 17 years old and you work in a sawmill . You lubricate the belts on ...
Contents
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25 | |
Love at First Sight Port Arthur Ontario 1934 | 44 |
Honeymoon in a Tent Ozone Ontario 1935 | 54 |
Hard Times in the Bush Peninsula Ontario 19381939 | 61 |
St Anthony Gold Mine Ontario 19391940 | 66 |
War PostWar Fort William Ontario 19431949 | 72 |
Middle age Fort William Ontario 19491963 | 79 |
A Hypothetical Reunion Thunder Bay Ontario 1994 | 197 |
Coming into Care Croydon Surrey England 1913 | 203 |
Rumburgh Halesworth Suffolk England 19131921 | 207 |
St Augustines Home Sevenoaks Kent England 19211925 | 210 |
Early Adulthood as a Waif Canada 19251935 | 211 |
Family Life Thunder Bay Ontario Canada 19351994 | 214 |
The Development of a Personal Identity | 227 |
The Childhood Trauma of Coming Into Care | 236 |
Middle Old Age Thunder Bay Ontario 19631984 | 87 |
The Final Years Thunder Bay Ontario 19851994 | 106 |
An Inherited Mystery of Family Origins | 111 |
A Review of Waifs and Strays Case File 18264 | 130 |
A Kind Stranger Joins the Quest | 175 |
The Unearthing of Relatives in England | 183 |
Assembling the Pieces of the Puzzle | 189 |