in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
September 02, 2025
Lori Oschefski, Founder and President of Home Children Canada, tells the stories of children nobody wanted — and the stories of those of us in Canada who are descended from those unwanted children. Lori is one of the driving forces behind Home Children Canada, a charity that chronicles the lives of children brought from Britain to Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth century — orphans or children from poor families who were shipped to Canada by charitable organizations (Doctor Barnardo’s Homes the most prominent of them) to augment Canada’s largely rural labour force and to rid Britain of children deemed to be present and future burdens. Home Children Canada exists to bring the stories of the British Home Children to light, to maintain their memory and to reunite families separated by these child migrant schemes. Its web site is at www.britishhomechildren.com.
Lori will talk about the Home Child phenomenon at 2:00 pm on Wednesday September 10 at the Kimberley Community Hall, 235309 Grey Road 13, in the village of Kimberley (doors open at 1:30). This event is free and open to the public (no registration required.) It’s the latest in a popular lecture series sponsored as a public service by the Grey Highlands PROBUS Club in cooperation with the Kimberley Community Association and the Grey Highlands Public Library. Lori will offer a moving look at the migration of British Home Children, exploring their hardships, resilience and lasting contributions to Canada’s history and wartime efforts.
Lori is a passionate advocate, author, and speaker who has spent over 17 years researching and raising awareness of Canada’s child migrant history. Her work has led to national recognition of the Home Children through advocacy efforts, historical exhibits, and the publication of her four books, including her recent Orphans of the Living (an Amazon bestseller) and her fourth book, Lost but Not Forgotten: The British Home Children, a historical book for youth. Through presentations, media engagements, and community outreach, she continues to ensure that the voices of the British Home Children are heard and honoured.
Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa were also the recipients of Home Children.
It’s not quite true to say those children were unwanted — more accurate, perhaps, to say they were often wanted for the wrong reason — wanted as labourers, not as family members. Although some Home Children found loving families here in Canada, many did not. Estimates suggest that about 75% of Home Children were abused or exploited in their new land — and multi-generational trauma was often the result.
The story of Home Children is woven into the history of Grey, Bruce in Simcoe Counties. In 1895, for example, Ellen Findlay of Keppel Township in Grey County was charged in the death of George Green, a Barnardo boy under her “care” — a coroner’s jury found that George had died “from ill treatment at the hands of Ellen R. Findlay and from her not giving him proper care and treatment, food and nourishment during his sickness in her house.” She served only one year in jail for the crime. In April 1896 two Barnardo boys 10 and 14 years old, who had been living with a farmer named Currie in Nottawasaga for three years, sought police protection in Stayner. Said the Flesherton Advance at the time, “The boys were dressed in very thin clothes only fit for summer wear, and Currie admitted he had broken every article of the agreement he had made when he took them. The elder lad bore marks of having been beaten inhumanly, and the evidence showed that he had been thrashed with a horse whip. The case excited much feeling, and the poor little fellows were taken home by two of the gentlemen present.”
Home Children were unwelcome in the minds of many Canadians. Said The Toronto Evening Star in December 1895: “The fact that a large assemblage of people in London presented Dr. Barnardo with a $15,000 purse as a recognition of his work in the exportation of waifs proves that the British know a good thing when they see it. If they were so anxious to help Barnardo reform the offscouring of London, and if the product of the waif cleaning factory were really reformed, they would not be so anxious to export the goods for which they were getting no pay. The fact is that the people of London recognize that they are getting rid of a troublesome class of population, and they are willing to pay anybody who ships the objectionable individuals out of the country.”
Lori’s first knowledge of Home Children came when she was 14 and read a book in her mother’s possession, Northern Nurse whose author was a Home Child. Later she discovered that her mother had been a Home Child, arriving in Canada at the age of two — a fact she only told her children in her old age. Lori helped her mother with research into her background. “It occurred to me — how many others had this hidden in their backgrounds?” says Lori.
Lori embarked on her journey of exploration in 2007 and soon found out she wasn’t the first to discover the story of Home Children. What eventually became Home Children Canada started as a Facebook group (a function that still continues) but it has expanded well beyond those roots, and social media has led to a marked distribution of the organization’s message. Originally called the British Home Children Advocacy & Research Association, it took on its current name in 2021. In addition to its member service activities, its dissemination of stories and its creation of museum exhibits related to Home Children, the organization hosts a Home Children Canada Research Site, accessible at www.homechildrencanada.weebly.com
She says there are several reasons why we should care about the story of British Home Children. First, she says, millions of Canadians are descended from Home Children. But even more importantly, she says, the story of Home Children is a story of the vulnerability of children. If we are to create a more compassionate Canada, says Lori, we would do well to learn from instances of the damage from lack of compassion that is as much part of our history as the more palatable parts of our past. “The truth will set you free” is a motto that Lori applies to the Home Children’s story. Yet she points out that the Government of Canada’s track record in acknowledging Home Children is spotty. While it has shared some archival material related to Home Children, some information has yet to be shared. British and Australian Prime Ministers have both apologized for these immigration schemes and Canada’s House of Commons has issued an apology for Canada’s complicity in Home Child immigration schemes, but the Government of Canada itself has not apologized, despite repeated requests to do so: in 2009, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stated that Canada would not apologize to child migrants, preferring to "recognize that sad period" in other ways.
Lori points out that the story of Home Children is the story of heroes too, including those families in Canada that adopted, embraced and loved the children assigned to them; the whistle-blowers — both in Britain and Canada — who drew our attention to the travesties committed in the name of charity; and the Home Children themselves who often survived, thrived and contributed to a nation that didn’t always welcome them.
She also points with satisfaction at the number of communities that have chosen to illuminate public buildings during National British Home Child Day, held in Canada on September 28 each year — illuminations that started in 2019, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first Home Children in Canada, with the illumination of Edmonton’s High Level Bridge.
“The story of Home Children is our shared history, woven into our fabric, present in our bloodlines and our landscape” says Lori.
Postscript: A large number of British Home Boys volunteered to serve in the Canadian army in the First World War. Many of them signed up as a way to visit their homeland. One such Home Boy volunteer was Albert Brooks, adopted son of Mr. George Sewell, Artemesia Township in what is now Grey Highlands, who was killed in action at the battle of Courcelette in September 1916. He had been in the trenches for 13 months. He was only 17 years old when he enlisted in November, 1914. Although a memorial service was held for him at Annesley Methodist Church in Markdale in March 1917, his body was never found.
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