Charles Bradbury was still a child when his throat was slit with a razor on Feb. 1, 1897. His charred remains were found the same day in a burned-down barn near the Don River.

The live-in farm hand had quarreled with his landlord and employer before falling into a “sulky fit” and earning a “slight kick” from the plowman, a local newspaper reported two days later. The man was never prosecuted for his death, dubiously deemed a suicide.

Several news stories, a name and a number — 983 — scribbled onto a graveyard plot card are all that survive to mark the boy’s existence.

Charles is one of 75 children whose remains lie buried, unmarked and virtually forgotten in a pair of mass graves at an Etobicoke cemetery. They were drops in the wave of British home children, sent in droves from the U.K. to build a fresh life on Canadian soil.

Now a research group has dug up their identities, giving new life to youths all but anonymous in death. The revelation unfolded as part of an effort to reclaim the pasts of more than 115,000 children shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants between 1869 and 1948.

“This thing at Park Lawn Cemetery was held under wraps for many years,” says Lori Oschefski, who heads the British Home Child Advocacy and Research Association.

The non-profit, which she leads from Barrie, researched the children’s dates of birth and family backgrounds (five of the 75 remain unidentified).

“We can’t just let the children go unrecognized and not know who they are,” Oschefski said. “Every life is valuable.”

Some — like “Baby Boy Ray,” born and died April 9, 1920 — were stillborn or infants. Others were teenage mothers who died in childbirth. Still others died from diseases like tuberculosis or septicemia, succumbing in some cases due to a lack of proper medical attention.

Oschefski has spent much of the past two years tracing the children to families in the U.K. The only hint of their interment was the misspelled names on their plot cards, collecting dust on a cemetery shelf, as well as a solitary stone in remembrance of one of the children and “dedicated to the memory of the members of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes.” The second plot has no headstone, a grassy void in a forest of granite.

“There ain’t many records,” said Ron Comek, in charge of plot sales at Park Lawn, who said he didn’t know until recently of the graves. “I’ve been in this business 35 years and I’m still scared to go up there.”

Comek noted the two plots, still owned by the Barnardo’s children’s charity after more than 120 years, lie in the oldest part of the cemetery, mouldering undisturbed by memory or footsteps. “It was very difficult to find them.”

Barnardo’s, founded in England 150 years ago by Christian evangelist Thomas Barnardo, took responsibility for tens of thousands of the children contracted out for years at a time to rural families in Canada. Dozens of other receiving homes did the same, but on a smaller scale.

At the time, authorities believed they were solving a problem: destitute children in the overcrowded, disease-riddled cities of Victorian Britain needed a fresh start; Canada’s mostly rural population needed labour.

All too often, the freshly minted farm hands and domestics — many as young as 10 — emerged from poverty or orphanhood overseas to find abuse, neglect and isolation waiting on the other side.

Barnardo’s did not respond to requests for comment.

Oschefski discovered the mass grave partly by luck. Her husband was visiting an antique shop when the owner mentioned he used to play in Park Lawn, despite the “rumours” of a mass grave filled with children.

Expecting to learn of a dozen plots at most, Oschefski contacted the cemetery. They sent her a list of 75.

“That just blew me away,” Oschefski said.

Over 50 years, their remains were piled into plots intended for no more than 24 caskets.

Jennifer Harrington, who curated an ongoing home child exhibit at Black Creek Pioneer Village, said many home children “were treated poorly, or even terribly abused.”

One article from 1905 on the death of a 15-year-old Barnado’s child reads: “The autopsy showed he had been prodded with a pitchfork, was under-nourished and poorly clad and bruised, had severely frostbitten hands and feet, and fractured skull. He lay on a bed of manure in his coffin.”

Harrington noted the sense of shame that accompanied the term Home Child. “They felt a bit like outcasts, and sometimes they were treated that way.”

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Some were well cared for and taken in as members of the family. The children were supposed to go to school, though this often depended on the farmer’s needs and harvest season.

“They worked on the farm with the idea that they would … have a nest egg once they were adults,” released from their contract at 18, with their meager earnings supposedly held in trust by organizations like Barnardo’s,” Harrington said. “Payment didn’t always happen.”

Oschefski hopes to raise $15,000 to install a memorial with the names of all 75 children at Park Lawn, which borders Bloor St. and the Humber River. The group has raised about $3,000 in the past month.

HOME CHILDREN’S STORIES

Walter Knight

Walter Knight, left, arrived in Canada from the ports of Liverpool, England, at age 12 to work as a farm hand north of Toronto. He died of unrecorded causes at 17 in 1896. He was one of the first children buried in Barnardo’s mass grave at Park Lawn Cemetery.

George Cavill

“This is fine farming country,” wrote 18-year-old George Cavill in 1901. He declared southern Ontario “first-rate” and learned to drive horses and run the binder and harrow. Despite being a poster child for the Barardo charity, which took him in and touted him in their magazines, Cavill was buried anonymously in one of their two plots at Park Lawn.

Bound to labour

This “after-sailing notice” from Dr. Barnardo’s Homes illustrates how the agency sent kids to Canada without alerting the parents beforehand. Parents lost their rights as guardians once a child was placed into care. “It destroyed these families; it destroyed these people,” says researcher Lori Oschefski.

Indenture agreement

This copy of the indenture agreement for British Home Child Cecil Bennett binds him to work as a farm labourer for five and a half years at $21 per year. From that amount would be deducted all his expenses, clothing, haircuts and other “necessaries.”

Benjamin Butterworth

Benjamin Butterworth, an orphan and milk delivery boy now buried at Park Lawn, stepped onto the tracks as two trains were approaching from opposite directions. He died from the impact in hospital at age 15 on Nov. 13, 1898. “The children were labelled as trouble-makers and degenerates by Canadian press and by society,” Oschefski says. “If anything happened, they were blamed.”

Charles Bradbury

Charles Bradbury was still a child when his throat was slit with a razor and his charred remains were found in a burned-down barn near Pape Ave. The farm owner, with whom he’d fought beforehand, was never prosecuted in the purported suicide. “It’s really not plausible that a child would slit his own throat and set a barn on fire to kill himself,” Oschefski says.

Albert Jefkins

Albert Jefkins, left, worked on a farm in Ontario as a boy. He arrived in Canada as a home child 101 years ago, going on to build a life and raise a family. Eventually he was buried at Park Lawn Cemetery in an individual plot. Neither Albert nor his son knew that a Barnardo mass grave lay nearby.

John Jefkins

John Jefkins, Albert’s son, sits next to the chest his father brought with him from Britain in 1915. John recently headed back across the pond to reunite with the family his father left, locating them online. They had no idea that he or his father existed.