Home children remember, part 3

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Day Media Update Limited CANADA - IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION Canada (Groups) * IMMIGRANTS B PINK 4d. 1985 VI Page 3 of * ering from childbirth and could not care for her new child. "I was never treated-'badly," Smith says. "But there was never time for fun or for school. Just work, usually 12 to 15 hours a day. "And no real friendships. You were always known as a 'Home Girl', always treated as an outsider, never as a member of the family." Smith was five when she. was placed in an orphanage after her father died. She remembers being taken up to his coffin, where he lay with pennies covering his eyes. "That about all I remember before the orphanage," she comments. She never saw her mother again although she tried to trace her in the late 1940s. "I wanted to find out what I'd missed without kin. But even if I had found her it would have been hard to compare something I'd never had to something I longed for." She ended a career as maid and housekeeper with a Belleville couple when they died in the mid1970s. Since 1977 she's had her own home in Belleville, an apartment in a high-rise seniors residential complex and has travelled extensively abroad and in the U.S. and Canada. Among the last Home children sent to Canada in the mid-1920s, Price and Smith both think they're better off today than they would have been- had they remained in Great Britain. In 1925, the Dominion Immigration branch ruled against what social service officials called "nation-building on the backs of children." The child emigration movement between Britain and Canada ended.

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