[Gráinne]

And Day 2! At least genealogy-wise, I'm hitting it out of the park lately.

It was known that my father's mother was born in Scotland and came to Canada at age 7, where she was adopted by a family in Ontario. Nobody seemed to know how she got there, and I don't know how much she told my father. When I began my sleuthing, to make a short story long, I found the British Home Children. From about 1870 to the 1930's, there was a well-meaning attempt to give poor children in the U.K. a chance at a better life in Canada or Australia. These children, not all of whom were orphans, were turned over or scooped up off the streets and placed in orphanages. Quarrier's was a large orphanage in Scotland, and through contacting them (they are still a social service agency today), I found my grandmother and her brother's records and their birth certificates!

Their mother had died young, leaving my grandmother and the brother the two youngest children in a family of nine. Their father must have thought they would be better off in Canada and so turned them into Quarriers'. I can only wonder if my grandmother watched the coast of Scotland retreating from the ship, not realizing that she would never see her father or siblings again (there's more evidence that she and her brother could see one another in Canada). Did she think it was a big adventure, but that she would go back? I don't know. And how did her father feel? I can only imagine giving up my children to be adopted across an ocean, having known them up to age 7 and 8, so we're not talking little babies. I hope he knew that he made the only choice he could given the straights he was in.

Unfortunately, many of the BHC became little more than house servants or farmhands, not true children of the family. I hope both my grandmother and her brother lucked out and had good families, or at least a tolerable childhood. I do know my grandmother's family changed her name from Mary to Maud because they already had a daughter named Mary.

I was only seven myself when she died, and she had never spoken of Scotland to me. I have mixed feelings-jubilation at "finding" her, but sadness for being so uprooted.