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Many of those digging through history may now be able to trace their roots back farther than they ever expected, and some will run right into ancestors who were orphans.
A new website, “Ancestors On Board”, went online last week and is providing information on passengers who left Britain bound for Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA, and I’ve found a fascinating article detailing the exodus.
The first tranche of UK outward-bound passenger lists – titled “BT27″, after the Board of Trade designation and shelf number of the original documents, held at the National Archives at Kew – covers 1890 to 1899 and went online last week on www.ancestorsonboard.com This is an online resource developed by the family history website company findmypast.com in conjunction with the National Archives and access costs from £5. The remaining decades up until 1960 are expected to appear on the website over the next six months, providing an invaluable resource for those researching their family history. An estimated 131,000 people left the UK every year between 1870 and 1913 alone, many of them in search of a new life: some, however, had no life to speak of back at home.
Those who “had no life to speak of back at home”, included orphans:
Today it may seem incredible that these “home children”, as they became known, having already suffered the trauma of losing parents and homes, should be summarily dispatched across the North Atlantic, but towards the end of the 19th century, orphanages in Scotland were filling up, at least partly due to the number of adults succumbing to tuberculosis, and the developing colonies were crying out for manpower. “Clearly it’s not a model that we would in any way endorse today,” says Martin Cawley, services director of Quarriers, “but we recognise that these things happened and we acknowledge that it’s a part of our history and it’s important that we are diligent in our support of Canada so we can help with genealogical searches or networking.
On 19 March 1891, a ship called the Hibernian left Scotland en route to Nova Scotia with 129 orphan boys from the Quarriers Homes. Between 1871 and 1938 more than 7000 “home children” of both sexes were sent to Canada by the one orphanage alone. Barnardo’s and Middlemore Homes also sent kids to Canada and Australia.
It’s estimated that as many as 200,000 of today’s Canadians can claim roots in the Quarriers Home orphanage, and many modern-day descendants are proud and thankful for decisions made so many years ago:
… My own mother’s father died and her mother had no money… so what do you do? She put the two little kids into Quarriers. Without that who knows what might have happened to them. I certainly wouldn’t have been around,” he adds, laughing. Cecil Verge, who lives in New Minas, Nova Scotia, and runs the British Home Children and Descendants Association, agrees that often the emigration experience was infinitely preferable to life at home. “If you look at Birmingham, where my father-in-law came from, in one street, St Thomas Street, during the 1890s, the male life expectancy was 17.”
More than 30 million people sailed from British ports along side the orphans, some who’s names we still recognize: Stan Laurel, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant.
I wonder if someday the same sort of information will be available through flight records from airlines. Imagine our children’s children’s children being able chart the path of their grandparents from birth country onwards, cross-reference these with others they may have connected with over the decades, and find connections those of us here now have no way of knowing will occur.
