Halifax County author Genevieve Graham stumbled across information about British home children in Canada by accident, but knew it was something she had to write about.
Between 1869 and 1948, more than 100,000 destitute and orphaned children were sent overseas to Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa after training for various skills and trades at special homes in England. Those who arrived in Canada expected to use their skills to work and have a better life.
But many ended up working as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants, often in terrible living and working conditions. Countless numbers died, and survivors often would not talk about their family history or how they came to Canada because of the way they were treated and regarded: as dirty, disease-ridden and unwanted.
The Forgotten Home Child is the eighth book written by Graham, and the fifth piece of Canadian historical fiction for Simon and Schuster.
“This was definitely the most emotional one (I've written),” said Graham. “This is one I connected with really deeply. How can you not with a topic like that?”
She said when she first found the article about the home children in Canada “I had to read it three times to make sure it was real, because how could we not know about this? That was my initial reaction to it.”
She said that she knew right away she needed to write a book around that part of Canada's history.
“My initial (reaction) was horror and shock, and the more I thought about it, the more angry I got that nothing had really been told about it, and that we were never taught in school about it.”
She said the story needed to be told.
“I had to order everything I could from the library and there wasn't a lot, which again is surprising” Graham said.
What she did find included stories by some children after they had grown up.
After the library research she joined a Facebook group for descendants of British home children, of which there are an estimated 4.5 million across the country.
“That's a lot, and most of them don't know that they come from these children,” Graham said, adding that after being regarded as disease-ridden and second-class in the way they were when they arrived, it's no wonder the home children didn't like to tell that part of their life history.
“When you're told that for so many years, I can imagine it would be very difficult to want to share that with anybody.”
She said descendants are pushing to have the home children experience made part of school curriculum, and she hopes the book will help get more people talking and aware of what happened.
It took her a couple of years after reading that first article in 2017 to do her research and weave the story together.
The book, which is garnering rave reviews, tells the story of five children who were moved from the streets of London to an orphanage, and then to a training home before being sent to Canada in the 1930s. Graham based the characters and their experiences in part in on more than 200 replies to a survey of descendants asking what they knew of their family member's experiences.
“All the stories that came back to me I was able to filter into the characters,” she said. “All the the things you read did happen to somebody.”
Graham's next book, scheduled for release next year, involves antisemitism in Toronto in the early 1930s that led to the largest ethnic riot in Canadian history – with 10,000 people brawling after a baseball game – and carries on into the Second World War.
Graham said it's important for Canadians to know more about some of the darker moments in the country's history.
“When you read historical fiction, and it has compelling characters, I find you touch the head and the heart (of readers).”
