Description

The future in their homeland was bleak, sometimes dangerous. Children, casualties of unemployment, disease and poverty in England and Scotland. They were the abandoned, the orphaned, sometimes forgotten, waifs. Canada offered an opportunity for a better life. Beginning in 1869, “Home Children”, as they became known, came here by the thousands. Prompted by curiosity about his grandmother, who arrived in Canada and passed through the doors of Marchmont Distributing Home, James Gilchrist explores the origins of the Child Immigration Program and the people that conceived the idea. He tells about the lives that these children could expect and how many of them came to be successful in this new land. Emphasis is on the positive in the recounting of stories from this often maligned project.

224 pages