Home Children advocate visits Strathmore

Times Reporter 

  

Author of ‘The Street Arab’ and ‘Belonging’ Sandra Joyce will be in Strathmore to speak about her books, her father and British Home Children. Joyce will be at the Strathmore Library on Oct. 15, beginning at 7 p.m. The presentation will also be videoconference to other library systems members in Southern Alberta. 

The story is firmly based on records she was able to find on her father from the Orphan Homes of Scotland, which is called Quarriers now and is still in existence. She happened to be on a trip to Halifax after her father passed away and came across the passenger list her father was on at Pier 21, the National Immigration Museum. 

When she typed in his name she got this list, took a copy, and was surprised to find out he had come over with the Orphan Homes of Scotland at 15-years-old, along with his 12-year-old brother. 

“That in itself was quite shocking to me because he had never said anything about that,” said Joyce. 

Another thing she found shocking was that he came as part of a group of children. Joyce has a journalistic background and the records piqued her interest. She went back to Toronto and contacted her sister who used to work as an immigration officer to ask if she knew anything about why a group of children were travelling,  quite often it seemed, and instead of using the same name over and over they used the quotation marks to duplicate the information. Her sister looked into it and they found out about the Home Child operations.  

“That just opened my eyes to this whole immigration scheme that was going on and as I did more research to find out what’s going on I thought this was such a large group of child immigrants who are being brought over not to really help them in that sense, but to work,” said Joyce. 

At least 118,000 kids have been sent to Canada through Home Children operations. Home Children would see poor or orphaned children sent to Canada and other British colonies to help alleviate labour shortages. 

“People sometimes get the idea that these were all kids that were on the streets and they had nothing else in their lives, but in a lot of the cases they weren’t orphans,” said Joyce. 

“In fact only two per cent of the ones we have documented so far were orphans, the others had one member of their parents still alive, or both, and they had just fallen on unfortunate circumstances and were unable, maybe only temporarily to provide for their children.” 

Some families would go back for their children only to be told they had been shipped to Canada. A law was passed in 1891 that gave the organizations the right to do this, without parental permission, once they accepted the children. 

“I think the whole scheme was borne of good intentions, that they were trying to help the impoverished children,” said Joyce. 

Her dad stayed in the Quarriers Village for four years before being sent to Canada, and that’s where things started to get a bit lost she thinks. 

There was no one to check on the kids; there were cases of horrible abuse on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end some were taken into the family and maybe even adopted. 

Her dad’s case, Joyce said, was somewhere in the middle; he was seen as a worker not as a child in any way, and was separated from his sibling. 

She remembers him saying things like the first farmer he worked for was really mean, he wasn’t allowed to sit at the table with them for supper or socialize with the children. She didn’t understand that at the time he was 15, not in his 20s like she had thought.

Joyce never did find her dad’s brother, but through some digging did manage to locate his older sister. Unfortunately she had also passed, but she did get to meet her four male cousins, and her eldest cousin’s daughter Moira Cameron, who is the first woman to become a Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London, England, breaking a 500-year-old male dominated tradition. 

“It was a momentous event to meet her,” said Joyce. 

When it came to writing her books she knew there were other people out there like her that wondered about their families, which was her purpose in writing her books and is what their organizations does. 

“I wanted to reach other people like me and the first book was to kind of explain the reasons why these children ended up in care, what life in care was like and then life on a farm here in Ontario,” said Joyce. 

“The second one is basically going through his life and never feeling like he belonged, because at first they were made to feel like they didn’t belong in Canada and they didn’t belong in Britain. It’s very important that this story get out there because it’s a large part of Canadian history when you consider that at least 10 per cent of the Canadian population are descendants of the British Home Children.”

To find out more about Sandra Joyce and British Home Children, attend the free gathering at the library on Oct. 15.  If you can’t make the other visit you can also find out more by going to www.sandrajoyce.com.