Home Children 1869 - 1892 (RG17 Index)

This database on the Name Index contains over 14,000 entries, being the names of children that various agencies brought to Canada from the UK during the years 1869-1892. It was transcribed by BIFHSGO volunteers from Canadian Department of Agriculture records (RG17), which have not been microfilmed and are only available by special request and only in hard copy form.

RG17 (Record Group 17) is a collection of Canadian Department of Agriculture records. Prior to 1892 (when it was taken over by the Department of the Interior), the Immigration Branch was under the jurisdiction of this department. The General Correspondence Series includes correspondence between the Immigration Branch and various UK sending organizations. These records have not been microfilmed and are only available at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in hard copy form. They are stored off site and must be ordered in by a researcher prior to visiting LAC.

The records hold numerous lists of Home Children that are difficult to access by the general public. It was therefore recommended that BIFHSGO volunteers extract all mention of Home Children from within these records and add them to the LAC Home Children database.

This transcription work was carried out between 2009 and 2011 by the following volunteers:

Jean Eppich, Marlyn Henry, Robert Manchip, Audrey McAllum, Frank McAllum, Marnie McCall, John Mullin, John Sayers (Team Leader), Audrey Stiles, George Swift

725 volumes (physical boxes) covering the years 1869 to 1896 were searched for files. Some years had no files while others had many files. The years with most names mentioned were 1886 to 1891. 14169 names were extracted, some with multiple entries. Other than the ships manifests, this set of records provides the most complete set of Home Children names for the period 1869 to 1892.

The transcribed records have been merged into LAC’s Home Children database as part of an agreement forged between LAC and BIFHSGO in 2006. However, BIFHSGO offering researchers a targeted view of the RG17 records here on its website.