Fegan Homes : Between 1869 and the late 1930s, over 100,000 juvenile migrants were sent to Canada from the British Isles during the child emigration movement. Motivated by social and economic forces, churches and philanthropic organizations sent orphaned, abandoned and pauper children to Canada. Many believed that these children would have a better chance for a healthy, moral life in rural Canada, where families welcomed them as a source of cheap farm labour and domestic help.
The founder of Fegan Homes, James William Condell Fegan, was born in Southampton, Hampshire, England in April 1852. By 1870 he was working in London where he became aware of the terrible living conditions of the poor, particularly of the children living on the streets. Fegan opened several homes to train boys to live a better life, his first in Deptford, England in 1872. Over the following years, he opened more homes, missions, orphanages, schools and training farms in London and elsewhere in England, including Ramsgate, Stony Stratford, Southwark and Goudhurst.
In 1884 he came to Canada to investigate the prospects for boys in this country and was very pleased with the opportunities available on farms. He brought ten boys out on his first visit and sent out another 50 later in 1884; there is no record at this time of who those 60 boys were nor where they were settled, although it is believed to have been Manitoba. In 1885 he established a home in Toronto, Ontario, at 295 George Street, where boys were sent from 1885 until 1939, when the last party of ten boys arrived. Over those years it is believed that 3,226 boys came to Canada and were settled primarily in southern Ontario. In 1925 thirteen Armenian boys came to Canada through the Fegan Homes, otherwise most of the boys came from south-east England, particularly London.
An estimated 3,200 Fegan boys came to Canada between 1884 and 1915, and from the end of the First World War until 1939, when emigration operations ended.
