*2010* ~ Year of the British Home Child in Canada

(Copyright CBC News 2009.  Further information can be found at CBA.ca.)

Old-fashioned sleuthing and some well-timed media exposure have helped shed light on a man whose First World War medal was found in a Chatham, Ont., chicken coop 40 years ago.

The medal was awarded to Lance Cpl. William Evlyn Skinner, who died in the Battle of Amiens on Aug. 8, 1918, and is buried in Villers, France.

Until now, little was known about Skinner, who was just 18 when he enlisted in 1915, unmarried and likely childless.

His story came to light in November, when the man who found his medal 40 years ago, Andy VanDerMolen, brought it to Dave Benson, the director of the Chatham-Kent Museum.

Census turns up clues

Laurel Van Dommelen of Wallaceburg, Ont., was living in England when she heard Skinner's story. An avid genealogist, she went through census records and found a William Skinner whose age and birthplace matched those of Cpl. Skinner.

She also found the names of parents and siblings and discovered an older brother James, whose next of kin was listed as Florence Brown of Chatham, the city where the medal was found.

This was "the first eureka moment," Benson told CBC News on Thursday.

The second came after two other genealogists, Carol and Eugene Lusk, who own the property where the medal was found, also got to work.

They discovered that William, James and their sister Florence had all travelled to Canada in the early 1900s as British Home Children, part of a large-scale program that sent more than 100,000 destitute children to Canada from Great Britain between 1869 and the early 1930s to work on farms and as servants.

James, who was in the army, saved enough money to pay his mother's fare to Canada. Eleanor Skinner settled in Detroit, the city where William was living when he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915.

Finally, the genealogists found Florence's daughter, one Dorothy McNaughton, a 91-year-old resident of London, Ont.

When Benson contacted her, McNaughton confirmed what little she knew of her mother's family: that her grandmother, Eleanor, had lived in Detroit but had returned to Chatham after the war to settle with Florence. She suspects Eleanor brought William's medal with her to Chatham.

How the medals ended up in a chicken coop may never be solved.
Kept in a box for years

VanDerMolen found the medal in the 1960s as he gathered eggs in a chicken coop in the backyard of his parents' home.

"I thought it was kind of neat and interesting," VanDerMolen told CBC News in November, when the story first came out. "I took it to school and showed the kids, then I pretty much lost interest in it and put it away."

He put the medal in a tin box for safekeeping, along with some old coins and other medals. He didn't pull it out again until late 2009, when he contacted Benson at the museum.

The medal, Benson discovered, was a Victory Medal, a circular copper medal given to "all ranks of the fighting forces" who served in the First World War, according to Veterans Affairs Canada.

On one side, the winged figure of Victory stands holding a palm branch in her right hand. On the other, the words "The Great War For Civilisation" and the dates "1914-1919" are inscribed, surrounded by a wreath.

Skinner's rank, name and service number are inscribed on the medal's rim.

"It's personally very satisfying," Benson said of cracking the mystery.

McNaughton and her son have told Benson they would like to see the medal. He will present it to them at a private reception on Jan. 22.

[Administrator's note:  This article duplicated from the British Home Children mailing list on Rootsweb.]

Members of Quarriers Canadian Family have been discussing how to celebrate The Year of the British Home Child. We are all agreed that the best approach would be a unified push from all members of the Home Child community. Are there chief organizers for other groups out there? Are others interested in forming an organizing committee for a new national umbrella group? Any suggestions or contacts would be appreciated. It would be good to make some common public announcements within the month. Here's what our group have put forward:

2010: Year of the British Home Child

Quarriers Canadian Family is an association of descendants of the almost 7,000 Scottish Home Children sent out to Canada between 1872 and 1933. We are dedicated to honouring these children for their courage and their determined efforts to build a better Canada. We actively encourage Canadians to remember these pioneers who made new lives for themselves in often-inhospitable environments.

The British and Canadian governments from the 1860s supported the emigration from the UK of more than 100,000 orphans and abandoned children to populate the empire and provide cheap labour for Canadian farmers and households. Many of these children went on to successful lives and made major contributions to the development of Canada. Some were badly treated and abused. All were stigmatized as 2nd class citizens. Many groups now work to recognize their meaningful lives. These children were the forebears of a full 10% of Canada’s population today!

We thank MP Phil McColeman for his concerted effort in successfully convincing Parliament to name 2010 as the Year of the British Home Child. We call on all Canadians to support us in our request to government to make 2010 a meaningful celebration for the approximately 4 million Canadian descendants of home children.

We will work towards:

1) An active national umbrella organization for all Home Child groups with one objective being the organizing of a National British Home Child picnic on Parliament Hill in summer, 2010.

2) The creation of a permanent exhibit in the National Museum of Civilization explaining the place of British Home Children in Canadian society.

3) The creation of a national memorial to Home Children placed on Parliament Hill.

4) The creation of a traveling display of Home Child life for circulation to local museums and libraries.

5) An approach to the Council of Ministers of Education to create a national Home Child awareness program within the curriculum.

6) Increased funding for the National Library and Archives programs of further digitizing and organizing the Home Child records and artifacts.

December 27, 2009

Fred Wardle
wardle@sympatico.ca
416 482 5017
382 Balliol Street
Toronto ON M4S 1E2

[Administrator's Note:  This is a scholarly work of the little known and little written about Fairbridge Farm School located in British Columbia.  It is copyright Dr. Patrick Dunae, 2007, dunae@mala.bc.ca.)

The Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, a residential school for underprivileged British children, opened in 1935. It was established by the Fairbridge Society and located at Cowichan Station, near Duncan, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. About 350 children – some as young as 4 years of age – were sent to the facility. The majority of the children came from Newcastle, Glasgow and other distressed industrial cities. Many of the children were selected from welfare institutions, notably the Middlemore Home in Birmingham, but some were surrendered by parents who saw no future for them in Britain. Resettlement in Canada was supposed to offer educational and economic advantages to the children.

The Fairbridge Society was named for its founder, Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge. Born in South Africa and raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he was an idealist and imperial enthusiast. His interest in child migration spang out of his first visit to London, England in 1903. The 18-year-old colonial was appalled by the poverty and plight of children in the slums of the British Empire's capital city. "The waste of it all," he wrote afterwards, "Children's lives wasting while the Empire cried aloud for men." He proposed to create communities in the overseas dominions where disadvantaged British children would receive a basic education and acquire vocational skills that would enable them to become successful farmers and homemakers. Returning to England as a Rhodes Scholar, he explained his concept -- his 'Vision Splendid,' as it came to be called -- to members of the Oxford University Colonial Club in 1909. They organized the Society for the Furtherance of Child Migration, which was incorporated as the Child Emigration Society and eventually became the Fairbridge Society. The first Fairbridge Farm School was opened at Pinjarra, near Perth, in Western Australia in 1912. Other farm schools were later estabished in New South Wales and Victoria.