The Canadian Centre for Home Children has received a $30,000 grant from the province's Community Development Fund. The Centre is located in Cavendish. It helps the estimated 100,000 home children sent to Canada from Britain to find their families and their family histories.
The home children were sent to Canada during the early part of the century. Many ended up working as labourers on Canadian farms. Few ever had the opportunity to find out anything about their birth families.
Using databases from the National Archives and a special archive for home children located in Britain, the Centre is able to help home children and their descendants find out about their roots.
The Centre is the brainchild of John Willoughby of Charlottetown. Since he began his research in the early 1990's, he has received and answered requests for information from all over Canada and the United States...and from as far away as Australia. Willoughby has also had a number of visitors to the Centre and says he sees great potential for it to develop further.
"The estimate is that there are 20 million descendants of these home children living all over the world. If even just a fraction of that number wanted to come to PEI to find out more about their families, we could be looking at a big boost for the Island's economy as far as spin off from these visits," he said.
Development and Technology Minister Mike Currie agrees. "John has done a tremendous amount of work to get this thing off the ground," he said. "I think it's more than likely that the Centre will attract a lot of people to the Island and to the Cavendish area, and we wanted to be able to support that."
Willoughby says his work to date has been difficult, but rewarding. He sums up the rewards by quoting a letter he received from the daughter of a man who was a home child. The Centre helped to reunite the man with his family in Wales.
"The letter says, in part, '(My father) tells me that all his life he felt that he was missing a small light and that his cousin brought that light to him. He tells me also that he is so delighted to have met and come to know the members of his family because he had always thought himself to be totally alone in the world.' Thanks to the Community Development Bureau, we'll be able to continue to help people like this man. I'm very grateful," he said.