Month: January 2024

BIFHSGO members likely received an email from Membership Director Anne Coulter, with instructions on how to restore access to member services. That includes adding a new password. I’m not sure everyone was impacted, but if you didn’t receive her email you may want to check your spam file.

Anne assures me there was no cyber attack so no personal information was compromised.

One project amongst the Library and Archives Canada’s Co-Lab Challenges reported progress.

Ancestry’s England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2022 has been updated to 7,166,817 records. That’s from 6,947,083 entries last August.

The corresponding Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2022 now has 916,681 records, updated from 897,449 entries.

A search provides name, gender, age, birth date, last residence (town), postal code district and death date. The source is not specified but appears to be compilations from unofficial records, such as funeral homes and newspapers,  from GreyPower Deceased Data and Wilmington Millennium, West Yorkshire. I estimate it covers about half the deaths occurring.

Yesterday I quoted a recent BBC article. Another quote from that article is “The child migration scheme sent a group of 100,000 impoverished children from Britain to overseas colonies between 1869 and the 1940s.”

That’s “overseas colonies” not just Canada. How many of those came to Canada?

The British Home Child Registry states “an estimated over 100,000 children were emigrated from the United Kingdom to Canada.”

The graph below is compiled from data at the British Home Child Registry and archived from that site through the archive.org Wayback Machine.

Since 2020 it has remained at over 83,000 entries in the database. As stated at the site “the Registry is updated online at least weekly.” There have been adjustments, down as well as up since 2020.

Where will the additional 17,000 be found? Could there be missing years? Unfortunately it isn’t possible to search that database by year of migration.

Two other sources are worthy of attention.

Library and Archives Canada states that “Between 1869 and the late 1930s, over 100,000 juvenile migrants were sent to Canada from the British Isles during the child emigration movement.” The Home Child Records database “provides access to more than 245,000 names of Home Children from records held at Library and Archives Canada and elsewhere.”

The much larger number is because it indexes mentions. A person may be the subject of entries in different sources — passenger lists, inspection reports, lists from immigrating agencies, death compilations, and more.

A database I’d overlooked is Canada, Home Children Immigration Records Index, 1869-1930 from Findmypast. It includes 125,086 results. Findmypast acquired this collection when it purchased Mocavo in 2016.

A couple of things to watch for in this FMP database. 80 records for the Liverpool Sheltering Home have no date given. The records turn up in all years from 1869 to 1930. The total of 125,086 accounts for that. Also, the collection includes many who had no association with a home, they were just (relatively) young people. That includes my 15 year old great uncle who arrived in 1903 bound for a relative in Saskatchewan.

Some were not that young. For example, the median age of the 24 immigrants from the Dublin Union & Dublin by Lamplight Institution in 1869 is 22.5 years. Likely different sources use different ages as cut-off or other criteria such as whether the child/person came in a party brought by an agency.

I’m doubtful there were as many as 100,000 home children, as properly defined, who arrived in Canada between 1869 and the start of WW2.

A recent BBC article included the sentence: “An estimated 10% of Canada’s population – around 4 million people – are descendants of the British Home Children.”

That’s a figure that is challenging to estimate. But it isn’t difficult to show how outlandish that 10% is.

Census Perspective

The population of Canada in 1869, the year that Maria Susan Rye brought the first party of children to Canada, was about 3.6 million. Canada’s population in 2024 is about 40 million. This means that the population increased by a factor of 11.11 over 155 years.

Assume that 100,000 arrived in 1869, the top of the range quoted in the British Home Children Registry for the total of those who came pre-WW2. Multiplying 100,000 by 11.11 produces an estimate of 1.1 million, or 2.75% of the present population.

This is an overestimate as not only did all children not arrive in 1869, but the total  population increased more by immigration than natural growth. 

All Home Children and All Descendants

Take 100,000 arrivals in 1869, but assume the death rate set to zero. That counts all the original home child immigrants and all their descendants, with births continuing to parents regardless of their age. Using crude birth rate stats, I chose those published by Barry Edmonston, Canadian Studies in Population 41, No. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2014):1–37, the total is 3,340,000. That’s 8.35% of Canada’s current population, still less than 10%.

Making the best estimate

These two scenarios show that 10% is outside the range of possibilities.To make a best estimate would require statistics on the number of children arriving in each age range year-by-year, the number leaving Canada by age year-by-year, and statistics for birth and death rates by age in Canada, back to 1869, year-by-year.  Such stats don’t exist.

Even the total number of home children arriving is uncertain, quoted as anything from 80,000 to 130,000.

As regard the 10% claim, I’m remined of the quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels,  “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”

Updates to newspapers.com in the past month continue to focus on 2023 . Otherwise, there were no updates for England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Australia or New Zealand.

For Canada, for earlier years, The Standard, St. Catharines, Ontario, was updated to 1,027,597 pages, 1891–2014.

Fishwrap, the newspapers.com blog, posted Kiss a Chimney Sweep for Luck: 6 Fascinating British Superstitions.

Two items that got missed from Tuesday’s list

Friday, 19 January

7 pm: What’s New With Family Tree Maker by Mark Olsen for OGS Niagara Peninsula Branch.
https://niagara.ogs.on.ca/events/niagara-peninsula-branch-monthly-webinar-series-2024-01-19/

Saturday, 20 January

11 am: Isle of Man Research, by Dan Poffenberger for the British Interest Group of Wisconsin and Illinois.
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrf-uhqTwqGtADV-L73yR4JZai6s69dE3G

The January 2024 Connect-a-Thon will start on Friday morning at 8:00am EST 19 January 2024, and runs until Monday at 8:00am EST 22 January 2024.

The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring the world closer together by adding missing people on  WikiTree.

Join a team for an area or topic of interest. including Canada, England, Scotland and Ireland.

Find out more at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Connect-a-Thon

With the latest updates, the  TheGenealogist  version of the 1939 Register now has more than 389,600 new individuals added.

These records, made available under the 100-year rule, are linked to pins on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™, a tool that allows you to view both historical and modern maps. Use it to explore and find out about the neighbourhood.

The most recent issue of Canada’s History had the following information in a box: St Patrick’s Day in Canada, on page 13.

Number of Canadians, in millions, who identify as descendants of Irish immigrants. They comprise about twelve percent of the population.

4.4 million is from the 2021 Census of Canada at  Statistics Canada. Table 98-10-0338-01  Ethnic or cultural origin by generation status: Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations with parts https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=9810033801.

Let’s dig further into those census statistics for the British Isles, including Ireland, remaining aware that they are self reported

Of the 4.4 million reporting Irish ancestry 3.8 million were multi-ethnic. The Irish diaspora in Canada is 87% of the population of Ireland.

Scotland has similarities with Ireland. Rounded to two figures Canada’s Scots ethnic ancestry population is also 4.4 million and its diaspora in Canada 80% of the population of Scotland.

Of the 5.3 million Canadians claiming English ancestry 4.2 million are multi-ethnic. The English diaspora were only 9% of the home country population.

By contrast, nearly half a million Canadians claim Welsh ancestry, that’s 15% of the home country population.

The table is a summary of the census results with the hime country population addded.

In total 10.7 million Canadians and Canadian residents claim British Isles, 10.4 million North American and 7.0 million Asian origins.