Neither Waif Nor Stray: The Search for a Stolen IdentityUniversal-Publishers, 2000 - 284 oldal My 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. |
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... learned that God loved him and would take care of him . There was no one else . Organizations saw the children as only living things -- a little more intelligent than animals . They treated them accordingly , and the children learned to ...
... learned love and trust from his caretakers . My Father's caretakers never provided him with an accurate explanation how he came under their care . When he was a young child , they may have simply told him he was abandoned , or his ...
... learned that it was his method of ensuring that the immediate situation would never overwhelm him . While doing this , he would also tilt his head back and raise his chin in a determined way . I believe he learned this as a young child ...
... learned not to ask questions of these strangers . The woman stops the cart in a very small village . There are only a few houses . There is so much open space around you . She takes you to a house and knocks on the door . An old man and ...
... learned not to do that when you were four years old . You are a little boy who does not know where he is , and does not know where he is going . There is nowhere for you to run . There is no one for you to turn to . No one knows who you ...
Tartalomjegyzék
11 | |
25 | |
44 | |
54 | |
61 | |
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 |
Child Training or Brainwashing? | 238 |
Depersonalization and Dissociation | 244 |
Malignant Memories of a Traumatic Childhood | 248 |
Bibliography | 273 |
Index | 277 |