Seywerd, Henry, 1910-1996 : Henry Seywerd, born in 1910, emigrated to Canada from Germany in 1928, just prior to the outbreak of the Great Depression. After a brief stay in Winnipeg, he took up farm work in Saskatchewan. This ended when the barn and house of the farmer for whom he worked were blown away during a dust storm, and Henry was left riding the rails, taking whatever work he could find, be this in lumber camps, mines, or factories.
From 1936 to1940, he worked with the YMCA in Montreal, taking evening course at Sir George Williams, from which he graduated with a BA in Sociology in 1940. He continued on, studying for his MA at McGill while working as a probation officer of the Non-Catholic Section of the Delinquents Court of Montreal and Verdun, where he remained for five years. Here he was active in rehabilitation work, and at the same time lectured in Criminology and Social Psychology at Sir George Williams University.
In 1951, he joined the Canadian Citizenship Council as Consultant on Immigration and Population Problems. Soon after commencing his work, the International Refugee Organization and the Department of Immigration sent him to Europe to organize Orientation, Information and Counseling Services for Displaced Persons in refugee camps who had been scheduled to come to Canada. This included organizing multilingual programs for adult education, designing school curricula for children in the camps, as well as helping to resolve problems encountered by individuals and families.
In 1954, he embarked upon the Seven Seas Orientation Project for migrants, which essentially involved teaching English to immigrants on board ship on their way to Canada. This was followed by a similar all-Canadian project on sailings of Greek Line ships. He concluded his work with the Department of Citizenship and Immigration in its Research Division, conducting studies on the effectiveness of immigrant language and citizenship classes.
In 1957, he took on the position as Director of a new Department of Research Services at the Headquarters of Scouts of Canada, in Ottawa. This essentially involved preparing reports directed to helping the scout movement better serve Canadian boys growing into manhood. In 1965, he joined the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto as Director of Research, where he remained until his retirement in 1978. Here he prepared a number of studies, all of them directed to helping immigrants adjust to their new life in Canada, or to aiding in particular low and moderate income families manage their life and financial resources in a rapidly changing urban environment. He died in 1996.
