Today recognizes a controversial historical event that not many Canadians know to have taken place in their country. September 28th is National British Home Child Day.
Lori Oschefski is the President of Home Children Canada. She explains that between 1869 and 1939, over 100,000 children were taken from their families in the United Kingdom and shipped to countries like Canada and Australia to be farmhands and helpers in the home.
“In Australia, they didn’t stop bringing them until about 1972,” she admits. “There was a lot of abuse of the children. They estimate that about 75 per cent of the children suffered some form of abuse. Even if they were physically abused, they were abused by the system in general.”
Many of the children were told that they were orphans, when only about 12 per cent of the children were so.
She adds that nearly 100 per cent of the male home children enlisted to fight in WWI in hopes of escaping the abuse and finding their families in England.
“Most of them took the story to their grave, and really, that is one of the most telling things about the severity of the trauma that they went through. But you know something, most of the Home Children survived.”
They lived on to get jobs, build homes, and create families, leading to over 4 million living descendants in Canada today.
“They are such an intricate part of the fabric of our nation. There isn’t much that had gone on in Canada that hasn’t been touched in some way by a Home Child.”
Home Children Canada has compiled a registry of over 86,000 impacted children, which Oschefski says can be used to determine if you are related to one of them.
“The registry is being built so it is searchable by not only the child’s name but by the placement name and also married names…We are just at the stage now where we are actively filling in the pages of the children to make sure we have as much information in that registry as possible.”
The registry can be accessed here.
To honour the British Home Children, Saskatoon City Hall and the Prairie Wind Monument will be lit in yellow.
