Neither Waif Nor Stray: The Search for a Stolen Identity

Első borító
Universal-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.

Részletek a könyvből

Tartalomjegyzék

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
Copyright

Gyakori szavak és kifejezések

Népszerű szakaszok

3. oldal - Judge not, and ye shall not be judged : condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.
143. oldal - Church of England Incorporated Society for providing Homes for Waifs and Strays, was founded in 1881.
232. oldal - Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all : to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
142. oldal - I, .!./(., of , do hereby engage with the above-named school authority, in consideration of my receiving the sum of per week, to bring up CD, aged years on the day of last, as one of my own children, and to provide...
94. oldal - Citizen is entitled to all the rights and privileges and is subject to all the...
134. oldal - Savile his son's guardian, with a strict injunction that the boy was to be brought up in the faith of the Church of England.
151. oldal - House, Westminster, London. SWI Sec. Martin Tilby. Church of England Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (otherwise known as Waifs and Strays) (i'215,421).

Bibliográfiai információk