Teenage emigration

[s4rah]

Hi all

The story told in my family is that my great-grandfather (William Edward James or Walker, b 1882 Costock Notts) emigrated to Canada in his early teens, taking his younger brother Albert (b 1887) with him. I haven't found any definitive evidence of this.

This has always sounded a bit off to me - at such young ages, would they really have been allowed to sail without a parent or guardian? I know things were a little less structured then, but two essentially unsupervised kids seem like the kind of passengers you really wouldn't want on a transatlantic voyage!

Has anyone come across similar circumstances to these?

Many thanks

Sarah

[Spanrz]

Has anyone come across similar circumstances to these?
Many thanks
Sarah

I have an ancestor that emigrated from Ireland to Brisbane / Sydney, Australia, around the age of 18ish?
But I haven't yet found information to suggest if he was with someone or not, on his Voyage to Australia or if he had any connections here?
He got married around 19 to a girl of 17 in Brisbane around 1864 and it was within a few months of arriving to Australia.
He was of a high notable family and most probably very well educated, so I gather he was well informed about the voyage to Australia.

[andycand]

Hi

It sounds like they may have been part of the Home Children scheme, the link below has some information

http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/

Perhaps a moderator could move this topic to Canada Board

Andy

[s4rah]

Hi Andy

Thanks for the link. I'll certainly consider the possibility.

[Rena]

I was told a "William Ward" of Suffolk in my husband's family had gone to Australia all by himself when he was sixteen and returned to England aged 21 to run a family business when a family member died.  Nobody could give me a date, nor tell me which of several William Wards had migrated and due to paucity of cheap steerage passenger list records I could find no mention of him;  until one family member mentioned he'd fought at Gallipoli.

I've now found his Australian army record which mentioned Gallipoli and which also gave his family's details in England.   A big bonus was reading that he'd applied for passage back to England due to an illness in the family.

[SwissGill]

When my gt grandmother died in 1893, her two teenage daughters, 14 and 16, emigrated to the States on the Majestic to join their father who had emigrated a year earlier with their two younger brothers.

I have a certificate from the Mexborough Board School confirming the younger girl had always attended school. I think "teenagers" in those days were equivalent to young women. A lot of them were working as servants, etc.

When I think of how I went alone by bus at the age of five to school each day and now see the mothers racing up in their cars to drop off their offspring instead of letting them walk up the lane from the lower part of the village I guess they will all need GPS navigators! Our little Swiss village is very quiet btw.

[Billyblue]

My Irish ggm and her sister emigrated from Tipperary to Australia in 1849.
They were aged 16 and 14 respectively and came under the 'Irish orphans' scheme.

The Irish apparently had a different definition of 'orphan' to what we know nowadays as 'without living parents' as we discovered their father and other siblings left behind in Tipperary, while mum was described as "mother in America"       

Dawn M

[jorose]

It makes a difference if there was family at the destination.  US authorities would hold unaccompanied minors as "LPC" (likely public charge).  Family would come to pick them up (or in some cases, I'm sure they didn't do this for tiny kids, wire money for train tickets to their final destination).  I believe the Canadian system worked in a similar way.

It might be that some older teenagers came over to work, with a contact at destination of an employer, and I think this might have been okay as well, particularly for live-ins (domestic work).  Again, it was mostly about if they had somewhere to stay and someone to be responsible for them.

Kids on government schemes were accompanied on the ship and had a destination (generally some sort of receiving home), so fulfilled those requirements.

Sarah, were these kids in England for the 1901 and 1911 censuses?  Is it supposed they both came back, or your ancestor did and his brother stayed?

[s4rah]

Hi jorose

Thanks for your reply.

I have not been able to find William definitively on any census, but Albert is on both 1901 and 1911. He also appears on a 1916 census for Alberta, Canada, but William is not on there either. (He seems to have had an aversion to records, I cannot find his marriage either!)

I genuinely don't know whether they would have had any contacts already living in Canada. Sadly, my great-uncle from whom we got the story has passed away since.