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From: Marj Kohli <>
Subject: Re: [TSL] children
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:36:47 -0500
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.1.20040312011156.0242c488@pop.theshipslist.com>


Cindy,

I sure can! I wrote a book on it.

In 1834 an amendment was made to the Poor Law which allowed the workhouses
to use money to emigrate inmates. You must remember that children, until
more recent times, were just seen as another pair of hands to help bring
money into the family and they were treated the same as adults. So when the
workhouse started to emigrate some of the inmates there were children in
those parties. As an example see this Cork Union info on TSL (not even
announced as yet)

http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/passengerlists/susan1850.htm

However, in 1869, Maria Rye, who originally had been assisting women to
emigrate to Australia and NZ, began to emigrate children to Canada. Rye
thought there were plenty of places in Canada where the children could find
work (since it was proving difficult to find work for them in England). She
was followed just a few months later by Annie Macpherson who began to bring
children placed in her home in London to Canada. Other agencies followed
suit and it was not until 1939 that this type of emigration ceased.

The belief was that the child would have a better life in Canada, where
food was plentiful and work available. The workhouses also had a monetary
motive -- it cost 10 pounds to send a child to Canada and far more than
that to keep them in a workhouse until they were 14-16 years of age. Also,
they found that many of the children raised in a workhouse kept coming back
after they were adults. They thought this was because they saw the
workhouse as their home.

For more on these children you can check out my web pages

http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/genealogy/homeadd.html

Regards..

Marjorie Kohli
Waterloo, ON Canada
Author of "The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada 1833-1939"
http://www.ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/


At 01:12 AM 3/12/2004 -0400, Cindy Marie Creekmore wrote:
>I found this information on the internet:
>
>Between 1869 and the early 1930s, over 100,000 children were sent to
>Canada from Great Britain during the child emigration movement. Members of
>the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa are locating
>and indexing the names of these Home Children found in passenger lists in
>the custody of the National Archives of Canada.
>
>Can anyone tell me WHY these kids were shipped to Canada? Were they
>orphans? streetrats? no parents? What the heck was the deal, and
>couldn't they have been found a place in England???

Marjorie Kohli
Waterloo, ON Canada
Author of "The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada 1833-1939"
http://www.ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/

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