Five years after it was discovered in a Scottish auction house in Glasgow, a long wooden box of about 80 glass negatives is now in Canada, where it is putting a spotlight on the heart-breaking history of the British Home Children.
The child migration scheme sent a group of 100,000 impoverished children from Britain to overseas colonies between 1869 and the 1940s. The images discovered inside this humble wooden box in 2018 – now seen for the first time – reveal much about a difficult history shared by the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
“This box is a critical part of our history,” Lori Oschefski, president of the charity Home Children Canada who has just purchased the box for the foundation’s archives, said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. By far, it’s the most complete box that I have ever seen.”
