A Home Child in Grey County
Home Children were placed on farms here in Grey County. Bruce Shepperd a resident of Meaford, and his cousin Bruce Shepperd of London, shared information about their parents who were part of the Home Children migration movement; Arthur and Nellie Shepperd. Arthur John Shepperd was born on April 21st, 1899, in Portsmouth England; he was one of fourteen children. When his father died in 1905, his mother continued to run the small family shoe repair business, but working and caring for all of her children became too much. She decided it would be best if her three youngest children lived elsewhere. She placed Arthur, along with his two older sisters Emma and Nellie, in a Barnardo children’s home. She did not know that her children would be sent to Canada. These three young children along with thousands of others faced the trauma of being separated from their families and taken to a new country to work.
The Home Children movement began to subside in Canada during 1924, when the Canadian Federal Government banned the immigration of unaccompanied juveniles under the age of 14. Great Britain continued to emigrate children until the mid 1960’s sending them to other British colonies including Australia and New Zealand. Many of Canada’s Home Children spent their lives searching for their parents and siblings with little success. It is estimated that one in every ten Canadians has a British Home Child somewhere on his or her family tree. Over four million Canadians are today searching for twenty million unknown British relatives. Some searches are being hampered by the unwillingness of the original immigrant organizations to release the information they have. Although the Barnardo organization’s aims were sound: to give marginalized British Children a new start in the colonies, the reality of the new world they provided was often harsher than they promised.
