Fegan Homes 

Fegan Homes brought more than 3,200 boys to Canada. This index provides a list of 3,530 home children's names, extracted from the original papers of Fegan Homes, currently held in private hands. This is a subset of the home children index maintained by Library and Archives Canada.

If you find a name in the database that interests you and would like to know where to find the Fegan Homes record concerning a particular child, please send an email to Queries. 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 the children living on the streets. Over the years Mr. Fegan opened several homes in England to train boys to have a better life—one with promise; his two main homes were at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire and a training farm at Goudhurst, Kent.

In 1884 he came to Canada to check out 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; no record has been found to date 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. Other than 13 Armenian boys who came to Canada through the Fegan Homes in 1925, most of the boys came from south-east England, particularly London.

Although James Fegan came from a Plymouth Brethren background, his religious views appear to have been more Evangelical Christian and his home in Canada was considered to be of a Methodist persuasion.

Mr. Fegan died at Goudhurst, Kent, in December 1925, but his wife carried on his work until her death, also at Goudhurst, in a bombing raid in October 1943. 

Fegans, as a society, is are still in operation as of March 2014 and holds additional records relating to boys who were brought to Canada. It may be contacted at:

Fegans
160 St. James Road
Tunbridge Wells,
Kent, TN1 2HE
England

Tel: 01892 538288 
email: info@fegans.org.uk