Blog Post Sixteen
Photo by Anne Nygard
Secrets: Part 3
My Grandmother and the Maternity Home that Shaped Her
My grandmother kept a lot of secrets. She lied a lot to protect her secrets which resulted in her pushing most of her family away. At the time of her death, it was our understanding that she had four children and, by the time she died, not one of them was on speaking terms with her. Ever since she died, the biggest question that always comes back up is why. Why did she tell so many lies? Why did she keep so many secrets? How many secrets did she have?
The detail in the non-identifying information was that my grandmother had been sent to a maternity home, and it listed where the baby had been born: London, Ontario. So, my grandmother had been sent to a maternity home in London at the beginning of 1948.
My next challenge was to find the maternity home in London, but I assumed this would be a real needle-in-a-haystack situation because there would never be a way to confirm which maternity home she went to. Much to my surprise, the city of London only ever had one maternity home in its history. It was run by the Salvation Army and called Bethesda Home & Hospital, and it existed from 1882 to 2012[1]. I found the same of this maternity home on a long list of maternity homes across Canada compiled on a website[2] supporting people dealing with separation by adoption. From this website, I found Anne Petrie’s heart wrenching book Gone to an Aunt’s: Remembering Canada’s Homes for Unwed Mothers which I bought immediately. I knew the exact maternity home my grandmother had been in would not be specifically mentioned in the book, but I hoped any Salvation Army-run maternity home would be mentioned. Sure enough, in the five or six maternity homes mentioned in the book, two were run by the Salvation Army giving me a solid idea of what my grandmother’s experience was like and how I thought it may have changed who she was. Finding all this information was huge for me, but putting all the pieces together has been both a breakthrough and devastatingly frustrating.
The frustrating part has been learning about maternity homes and their fundamental blame/shame culture that was drilled into the minds of all the females that were ever sent there. Maternity homes are not something anyone is aware of unless they are sent to one or they know someone who was sent to one. Some were sent to homes near their parents and others were sent to homes in the neighbouring province; the goal was to hide the females so as not to be embarrassed by their unwed pregnant status. Petrie’s book title is the mainstay excuse used by parents when asked where their daughters were: gone to an aunt’s place for a few months to help out. This is likely what my great-grandfather told people, and it would have been easily believable, he actually did have a sister that lived in London so few would have thought anything of it unless they had been privy to a similar situation in their own family.
Reading Petrie’s book, which is a beautifully written account, was also frustrating because of how commonplace blaming the female was and always has been; it takes two people to make a baby but somehow, it’s never the male’s fault and they get to move on with their lives as if nothing ever happened. In most maternity homes, girls were not allowed to use their own names, or only first names but not last names, and never reveal where they lived or any personal details that could identify their families. Counselling sessions were manipulation sessions: How did you get yourself pregnant? How did you get yourself raped? What are you going to do to get yourself out of this mess you got yourself in? This kind of misogyny has always thrived and placing in the context of my grandmother’s childhood is simply enraging; the maternity home culture and the prejudices of the time molded my grandmother into someone who didn’t trust others to see her side. She expected to be blamed and shamed, so she kept secrets and ran away from people to do so.
More inspiration to tell this story came from genealogist Crista Cowan’s podcast Stories that Live in Us which is a collection of stories from various people whose genealogical journeys brought them to an understanding about their physical and emotional roots. You can find Stories that Live in Us anywhere you listen to podcasts.
#cristacown #ancestry #storiesthatliveinus
[1] The Salvation Army, Salvation Army to close London Bethesda Centre (https://salvationarmy.ca/ontario/2012/02/salvation-army-to-close-london-bethesda-centre/ : accessed 05 Nov 2024).
[2] Origins Canada, Maternity Homes in Canada (https://www.originscanada.org/adoption-practices/adoption-realities/homes-for-unwed-mothers/ : accessed Jul 2024).