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Immigrant children from Dr. Barnardo's Homes at Landing Stage, St. John, NB. These were the first children to arrive after World War I. (Libray and Archives Canada PA-041785) the country" to Killajoe. As they approached the old train station, Joe cryptically said, "That's where they left...the boy...." Joe began to get even more agitated as they approached the nearby ghost town of Brudenell. Joe was excited to recognize Queen of Angels Church, but refused to drive past the cemeteries. Dave thought this odd, but not wanting to intrude, did not press further. The answer to this strange behaviour came in 1979, 14 years after his father's death. Upon reading Phyllis Harrison's collection The Home Children: Their Personal Stories, it dawned on Dave: His father may have been a-Home Child. It took another 11 years to prove it. As educators with a passion for ancient history and archaeology, Dave and Kay were well-suited for the detective work which was in store. Dave started to fit the pieces together, gathering snippets of information from his own mother, writing to many former "sendV ing agencies" in Britain. When he retired, it took Dave four years of researching records at Ottawa's National Archives to discover that his Cardiff-born father came from London, England; that in February 1914, at 15,. he sailed unattended on the SS Virginian; that he had been sent as a farmhand to Brudenell; that "an incident with a pitchfork" had him hiding in the woods until the neighbours found him and returned him to the Catholic "distribution home" in Ottawa, St. George's Home. In his next placement, in Fallowfield, he was treated well. In 1991, as outgoing president of Heritage Renfrew, a local history society, Dave was invited to lecture on any topic of his choice. He told his colleagues that he would like to speak on Home Children, because "nobody seems to know a damn thing about them." One responded, "Oh, I wasn't allowed to : play with Home Children." ; Dave describes this moment as magic, "an epiphany," when he realized 'why these children never talked about their pasts: They were stigmatized. If that conversation was the conception of Home Children Canada, the first Home Child reunion was its birth. One major goal of HCC would be to explain and remove the: shame that these children-now-adults had carried for all their years. ;i/ ^Vfe""'::V Who were these 100,000 children sent to Canada between 1869 and the 1930s? Why were they sent so far, to live among strangers? Why were they so ashamed that, in later years, even their own families did not know their past? . Post-Industrial Revolution Britain: the city The Country Connection 17