Coram launches its fascinating and moving digital archive bringing to life the experiences of children who grew up at the Foundling Hospital
Almost 100,000 pages of records from the Foundling Hospital, England’s first home for babies who were unable to be cared for by their parents, have today been made available online for the first time. The digital archive, launched by the UK’s first children’s charity Coram, which was established as the Foundling Hospital in London in 1739, brings to life the previously untold stories of over 20,000 children who grew up at the Hospital and of their birth mothers.
Today’s digital archive launch is the culmination of Coram’s five-year programme, Voices Through Time: The Story of Care, made possible by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Coram has digitised 405 volumes in the archive, almost a quarter of the entire collection, spanning 1739 to 1899. Nearly 6,500 volunteers from around the world helped transcribe the digital pages to enable detailed searching of their contents.
The digital images and their transcripts are free to access online. In addition to the records about the children, the digital archive contains intimate and moving petition letters from mothers seeking the admission of their children into the Foundling Hospital, and books containing tokens left as a symbol of the connection between mother and child.
The digital archive provides a rich historical resource for research into the lives of working-class women across England, and the history of education, childcare, employment, medicine, disability, textiles, and more. Family historians will find details of children, parents, Hospital staff, and apprenticeship masters and mistresses.
Dr Carol Homden, CEO of Coram, said:
“Through these extensive and detailed records, we are able to discover the untold stories of thousands of children who were raised at the Foundling Hospital in the 18th and 19th centuries, and hear rare first-person accounts of the issues faced by women who had no source of support in the harsh environment before the welfare state. It enables us to learn more about the evolution of social attitudes to children’s rights and welfare and the role Coram has and continues to play in pioneering good practice and developing children’s services since 1739.”
She added, “We are enormously grateful to the thousands of volunteers who participated in the programme, care-experienced young people who have shared their own stories, and to The National Lottery Heritage Fund in enabling uhttps://archives.coram.org.uk/s to preserve this precious archive for future generations.”