[an error occurred while processing this directive] Researching Children's Home records: Other Homes
Ancestry UK

Children's Home Records

Other Homes

The survival of records for the large number of small independent children's homes is generally very limited and tends to include administrative documents rather than details of inmates. As noted earlier, the many individual institutions documented on this website include, where known, details of their surviving records.

Another useful resource to trawl for such establishments is the Discovery facility run by the National Archives (TNA). For example, a Discovery search for 'Railway Servants Orphanage' indicates that Admission and Discharge registers for the institution are at Derbyshire Record Office.

TNA itself holds inspection reports for many homes from around 1948 to 1970. You can search for these in the Discovery catalogue. As elsewhere, however, many of these records have a closure period, typically of 75 years.

The records for the large number of smaller institutions are most likely to have survived where the operators of such establishments still exist in some shape or form, such as Coram, who formerly ran London’s Foundling Hospital, and Barnardo's, who inherited the records of children emigrated via Marchmont, the Annie Macpherson Home or the Liverpool Sheltering Home.