Little Immigrant Lost: Finding Dad
Written by Gail S. Smith
Swept under the carpet for many years, a British child emigration scheme was in operation between 1869 and 1939. More than 100,000 children, most between seven and fourteen years of age, but some as young as four, were sent to Canada from the British Isles by at least fifty childcare organizations.This scheme was brought about by a number of social and economic factors, both in Great Britain and in Canada . In Great Britain , it helped to relieve the problems of large numbers of orphan and pauper children in the city streets, and overcrowded workhouses and orphanages. In Canada, the children helped meet the demand for cheap labor, both agricultural and domestic.
It may have originally been hoped that the children would be taken into a receiving family’s home and raised as one of their own, but these children were there to work—girls as domestics and boys as farm laborers—essentially as indentured servants until age eighteen and often subject to abuse. Agencies went to great lengths to sever family connections back in England and to erase the identities of these children. Occasionally a child would get lucky and be adopted into a new family in Canada , although most were not.
Regardless of whether their experiences were good or bad, these children share one common trait: as adults, they rarely talked about their past, not even to their families. Their pasts were considered something to be ashamed of, and each of these children was subject to discrimination and scorn. The families in England who sent these children off to this “better life” in Canada —most of whom never again had contact with their children—didn’t talk about the experience either.
Today these children are known as the British Home Children, or the Little Immigrants. And I discovered, quite accidentally, that my father, Thomas Gordon Brocklebank, and his brother, Harold, were among them.
***
When I started my search, not only did I not know my father was a British Home Child, I didn’t even know what a British Home Child was, nor did I have much of an interest in genealogy.
One day, however, after an unusual finding on an Internet search of my maiden name, I started looking for family information. My initial goal was to find out why and how Dad left England to live in Canada and then the United States . I had little to go on, just bits and pieces of family lore. Dad had died several years before; Mother had died a year later. My sister and two brothers didn’t know any more than I did, maybe even less.
I knew Dad had immigrated to Canada when he was young, had worked on farms there, and had been in an orphanage. He had two brothers and two sisters. I knew his brother, Harold, had also come to Canada and the United States and ultimately lived down the street from my family prior to my birth, but that was all I knew.
While surfing the Internet, I tried looking up immigration to Canada and found a promising looking website called Young Immigrants to Canada. Here I was introduced to British Home Children, and as I read about them, it all seemed to fall into place. I found the link to a database of children’s names on the Canadian Genealogy Centre website. The database is an ongoing indexing project of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO), in which names of Home Children are extracted from passenger lists held by Library and Archives Canada.
Doing a search, I typed in my father’s name but had no hits. Trying a more general search, I put in just the surname which resulted in two hits: Harold Brocklebank and Jane Brocklebank. Clicking on the icon by Harold’s name produced a page with data for Harold containing basic, but important, information: he arrived March 1914 on the S.S. Canada, destination Hamilton, Ontario.
I didn’t know for sure that this was Dad’s brother, but still I was ecstatic.
The “party,” or sending organization, unfortunately, was not given, but the destination of Hamilton, Ontario, was an important clue. I learned through research that the children went to different distributing homes in different towns, depending on the sending organization.
By determining which organization had a distributing home in Hamilton, Ontario, and the present address of the home in England, I was able to obtain copies of Harold’s orphanage records. These records confirmed that Harold was in fact my uncle and also eliminated the possibility of Jane—the other Brocklebank on the list—being another sibling.
But where was Dad? All evidence pointed to him being a British Home Child, but I had yet to prove it.
Harold’s records held a clue. Though Dad had not been placed in the same home as his brother, Harold’s records placed Dad at “Home Farm Rimouski, Quebec,” in December 1910. I also learned that a sister of Dad and Harold, Gertrude, had been sent to an orphanage, although not an orphanage that sent children to Canada . Through more online research, including subscribing to a RootsWeb mailing list, I was able to obtain the name and address of Gertrude’s orphanage and ultimately her records. From her admission record in 1908, Dad appeared to still be with his family in England. So I had a three-year time period for Dad’s probable year of immigration—1908 through 1910.
All this was found pretty quickly, but finding Dad was a different story. I didn’t know if “Home Farm” referred to a distributing home or just a private home on a farm. Since there was no distributing home in Rimouski , the consensus from a number of sources was that “Home Farm, Rimouski ” was just a family farm.
I started out writing to orphanages in England, but it soon became obvious that, with overseas postage, return postage, and donations to the homes for their efforts, it could be an expensive and futile option. I instead turned to passenger lists on microfilm. I searched only within the three-year time period, but, without a doubt, four ports of arrival multiplied by three years equaled a lot of ships, a lot of passenger lists, and a lot of microfilm reels.
Three years and twenty-four reels of microfilm later, I got the break I needed from a friend, a knowledgeable genealogist who suggested trying St. Albans Immigration records, a set of records created in 1894 in an effort by the United States government to document immigrants entering across the Canadian border.
Searching the appropriate microfilm, I found Dad’s entry into the United States from Canada without any difficulty. The record provided quite a lot of information on just one little index card. Most importantly, it indicated that he landed in Quebec in August 1908 on theEmpress of Britain —exactly what I was looking for. However, searching another reel of passenger lists (one I had already searched), I found that he wasn’t there. In fact, there wasn’t even a sailing of the Empress of Britain in August 1908. I went back and scrutinized that record. Was it really 1908? Comparing it with other numbers on the same record, I concluded that it was. Assuming the record to be at least partially correct, I searched the rest of the 1908 reel for other sailings of the Empress of Britain , as well as those of theEmpress of Ireland, all with no luck.
Then I tried August 1909 and found a sailing of the Empress of Britain. It was on this list that I found Dad, all by himself, listed as Tom Brocklebank, not Gordon. His destination was Nauwigewauk, New Brunswick. Unfortunately, there was no sending organization named, nor any indication that he was a Home Child.
I looked through the rest of the ship’s passenger list to see if anyone else was going to Nauwigewauk. I found only two others—a woman in steerage with Dad, and a woman in first class named Ellinor Close.
At that point, I went back to do some playing around with the Home Children database. I wanted to know what organizations sent children to New Brunswick. Searching with “ New Brunswick ” as my key words, I had 682 hits. Before too long, I came across a child from the Ellinor Home whose destination was New Brunswick. It had a familiar ring to it.
Going back through old correspondence, I found letters from when I was inquiring about Home Farm, Rimouski. In one of the replies, there was mention of an Ellinor Home Farm in Nauwigewauk, but the person who wrote the reply concluded it probably wasn’t what I was looking for because it was a long way from Rimouski and there were no existing records of the home. It was run by a Mrs. Ellinor Close, the same person on the Empress of Britain. This was the home I was looking for.
Things started moving quickly. John Sayers of Home Children Canada and the British Home Children Database had come across an article about the Ellinor Home that named twenty-six children, including a Gordon Brocklebank, but he didn’t know its source. Three days and a lot of Internet searching and e-mailing later, the article source was identified, and some record s of the home were located in the Kings County Historical Museum in Hampton, New Brunswick.
On a tip from someone on the British Home Children mailing list, I learned that copies of vintage glass plate negatives of New Brunswick-area photographs were available for purchase from a photographer in New Brunswick. In the collection were pictures of the Ellinor Home Farm, one of which included my dad.
One lesson in particular stands out for me in the story of the British Home Children: the strength of family ties, what genealogy is all about. These children went to great lengths in attempts to be reunited with their families in England, to locate their siblings who were also sent to Canada, and to learn more about their own identities. Some children searched all their lives and never learned who their family was. For many of these children, the search continues with their descendants.
My dad, for example, and my Uncle Harold somehow reconnected in Detroit fourteen years after their separation. Both made their permanent homes there and became U.S. citizens. Among the letters in Harold’s orphanage records was a letter from their oldest sister, Annie, in England, saying she was out of work and needed money for her wedding but couldn’t find their father. Harold arranged to have $25 sent to her from his account.
While they corresponded as adults, Dad and Annie were never reunited. Among family pictures, however, I found a picture of Annie. It is signed on the back, just a simple note, but it speaks volumes. “To Tom, from your loving sister Anne.”
It may have originally been hoped that the children would be taken into a receiving family’s home and raised as one of their own, but these children were there to work—girls as domestics and boys as farm laborers—essentially as indentured servants until age eighteen and often subject to abuse. Agencies went to great lengths to sever family connections back in England and to erase the identities of these children. Occasionally a child would get lucky and be adopted into a new family in Canada , although most were not.
Regardless of whether their experiences were good or bad, these children share one common trait: as adults, they rarely talked about their past, not even to their families. Their pasts were considered something to be ashamed of, and each of these children was subject to discrimination and scorn. The families in England who sent these children off to this “better life” in Canada —most of whom never again had contact with their children—didn’t talk about the experience either.
Today these children are known as the British Home Children, or the Little Immigrants. And I discovered, quite accidentally, that my father, Thomas Gordon Brocklebank, and his brother, Harold, were among them.
***
When I started my search, not only did I not know my father was a British Home Child, I didn’t even know what a British Home Child was, nor did I have much of an interest in genealogy.
One day, however, after an unusual finding on an Internet search of my maiden name, I started looking for family information. My initial goal was to find out why and how Dad left England to live in Canada and then the United States . I had little to go on, just bits and pieces of family lore. Dad had died several years before; Mother had died a year later. My sister and two brothers didn’t know any more than I did, maybe even less.
I knew Dad had immigrated to Canada when he was young, had worked on farms there, and had been in an orphanage. He had two brothers and two sisters. I knew his brother, Harold, had also come to Canada and the United States and ultimately lived down the street from my family prior to my birth, but that was all I knew.
While surfing the Internet, I tried looking up immigration to Canada and found a promising looking website called Young Immigrants to Canada. Here I was introduced to British Home Children, and as I read about them, it all seemed to fall into place. I found the link to a database of children’s names on the Canadian Genealogy Centre website. The database is an ongoing indexing project of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO), in which names of Home Children are extracted from passenger lists held by Library and Archives Canada.
Doing a search, I typed in my father’s name but had no hits. Trying a more general search, I put in just the surname which resulted in two hits: Harold Brocklebank and Jane Brocklebank. Clicking on the icon by Harold’s name produced a page with data for Harold containing basic, but important, information: he arrived March 1914 on the S.S. Canada, destination Hamilton, Ontario.
I didn’t know for sure that this was Dad’s brother, but still I was ecstatic.
The “party,” or sending organization, unfortunately, was not given, but the destination of Hamilton, Ontario, was an important clue. I learned through research that the children went to different distributing homes in different towns, depending on the sending organization.
By determining which organization had a distributing home in Hamilton, Ontario, and the present address of the home in England, I was able to obtain copies of Harold’s orphanage records. These records confirmed that Harold was in fact my uncle and also eliminated the possibility of Jane—the other Brocklebank on the list—being another sibling.
But where was Dad? All evidence pointed to him being a British Home Child, but I had yet to prove it.
Harold’s records held a clue. Though Dad had not been placed in the same home as his brother, Harold’s records placed Dad at “Home Farm Rimouski, Quebec,” in December 1910. I also learned that a sister of Dad and Harold, Gertrude, had been sent to an orphanage, although not an orphanage that sent children to Canada . Through more online research, including subscribing to a RootsWeb mailing list, I was able to obtain the name and address of Gertrude’s orphanage and ultimately her records. From her admission record in 1908, Dad appeared to still be with his family in England. So I had a three-year time period for Dad’s probable year of immigration—1908 through 1910.
All this was found pretty quickly, but finding Dad was a different story. I didn’t know if “Home Farm” referred to a distributing home or just a private home on a farm. Since there was no distributing home in Rimouski , the consensus from a number of sources was that “Home Farm, Rimouski ” was just a family farm.
I started out writing to orphanages in England, but it soon became obvious that, with overseas postage, return postage, and donations to the homes for their efforts, it could be an expensive and futile option. I instead turned to passenger lists on microfilm. I searched only within the three-year time period, but, without a doubt, four ports of arrival multiplied by three years equaled a lot of ships, a lot of passenger lists, and a lot of microfilm reels.
Three years and twenty-four reels of microfilm later, I got the break I needed from a friend, a knowledgeable genealogist who suggested trying St. Albans Immigration records, a set of records created in 1894 in an effort by the United States government to document immigrants entering across the Canadian border.
Searching the appropriate microfilm, I found Dad’s entry into the United States from Canada without any difficulty. The record provided quite a lot of information on just one little index card. Most importantly, it indicated that he landed in Quebec in August 1908 on theEmpress of Britain —exactly what I was looking for. However, searching another reel of passenger lists (one I had already searched), I found that he wasn’t there. In fact, there wasn’t even a sailing of the Empress of Britain in August 1908. I went back and scrutinized that record. Was it really 1908? Comparing it with other numbers on the same record, I concluded that it was. Assuming the record to be at least partially correct, I searched the rest of the 1908 reel for other sailings of the Empress of Britain , as well as those of theEmpress of Ireland, all with no luck.
Then I tried August 1909 and found a sailing of the Empress of Britain. It was on this list that I found Dad, all by himself, listed as Tom Brocklebank, not Gordon. His destination was Nauwigewauk, New Brunswick. Unfortunately, there was no sending organization named, nor any indication that he was a Home Child.
I looked through the rest of the ship’s passenger list to see if anyone else was going to Nauwigewauk. I found only two others—a woman in steerage with Dad, and a woman in first class named Ellinor Close.
At that point, I went back to do some playing around with the Home Children database. I wanted to know what organizations sent children to New Brunswick. Searching with “ New Brunswick ” as my key words, I had 682 hits. Before too long, I came across a child from the Ellinor Home whose destination was New Brunswick. It had a familiar ring to it.
Going back through old correspondence, I found letters from when I was inquiring about Home Farm, Rimouski. In one of the replies, there was mention of an Ellinor Home Farm in Nauwigewauk, but the person who wrote the reply concluded it probably wasn’t what I was looking for because it was a long way from Rimouski and there were no existing records of the home. It was run by a Mrs. Ellinor Close, the same person on the Empress of Britain. This was the home I was looking for.
Things started moving quickly. John Sayers of Home Children Canada and the British Home Children Database had come across an article about the Ellinor Home that named twenty-six children, including a Gordon Brocklebank, but he didn’t know its source. Three days and a lot of Internet searching and e-mailing later, the article source was identified, and some record s of the home were located in the Kings County Historical Museum in Hampton, New Brunswick.
On a tip from someone on the British Home Children mailing list, I learned that copies of vintage glass plate negatives of New Brunswick-area photographs were available for purchase from a photographer in New Brunswick. In the collection were pictures of the Ellinor Home Farm, one of which included my dad.
One lesson in particular stands out for me in the story of the British Home Children: the strength of family ties, what genealogy is all about. These children went to great lengths in attempts to be reunited with their families in England, to locate their siblings who were also sent to Canada, and to learn more about their own identities. Some children searched all their lives and never learned who their family was. For many of these children, the search continues with their descendants.
My dad, for example, and my Uncle Harold somehow reconnected in Detroit fourteen years after their separation. Both made their permanent homes there and became U.S. citizens. Among the letters in Harold’s orphanage records was a letter from their oldest sister, Annie, in England, saying she was out of work and needed money for her wedding but couldn’t find their father. Harold arranged to have $25 sent to her from his account.
While they corresponded as adults, Dad and Annie were never reunited. Among family pictures, however, I found a picture of Annie. It is signed on the back, just a simple note, but it speaks volumes. “To Tom, from your loving sister Anne.”
Born and raised in Detroit, Gail Smith is a long-time resident of Lake Linden in Michigan ’s Upper Peninsula . Gail, a microbiologist, is a member of the Houghton-Keweenaw County Genealogical Society, and has been researching her family history for almost six years. She recently took first place in the Original Research Story category at the 2005 International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE) writing competition for this essay. Gail can be reached at [email protected] .
