Good morning, all:

This may help you out a bit, Shelagh. I think that your Patrick McGinty may have been a British Home Child as was my Grandfather, who came from England to St. George's Home on Wellington Street , Ottawa, in 1901. My grandfather had been in an orphanage in East London, England until he was sent to Ottawa by the Sisters of St. Joseph who ran an orphanage in London.

I have a general web page on British Home Children in the Ottawa area at www.bytown.net/homekids.htm . It mentions St. George's Home -- the children were mainly sent from the Port of Liverpool, by Steamship to Montreal, and then by train to St. George's Home, Ottawa, where they were distributed as labourers to work on farms in the Ottawa area, until age 18.

You may be able to find your Patrick in the 1901 census for the UK. See my grandfather's web page at www.bytown.net/lewisedward.htm for an example of how to search the UK Census records. You will also find my grandfather as living in St. Josephs Orphanage in London and a passenger list of the children who were sent out on the ship "Parisian" in 1901.

I notice that your grandfather was connected to the Eccles family who went to Iowa. This family, (I think that Eccles Street in the Hintonburg neighbourhood of Ottawa was named after them), went to Iowa in the late 1890's but many of the family stayed here in Ottawa. Eccles Street was a strong Irish Catholic working class neighbourhood at the turn of the last century and many of the families were related.

I have a lot of stuff about families from Ottawa who went to Iowa, including the family of Mary Ann McGinty. Go to the page at www.bytown.net/iowa.htm, and using the Google search engine at the bottom of the page, do a search for McGinty. Then do a separate search for each of the following: Eccles, Hintonburg.

As a co-incidence, the current premier of Ontario is Dalton McGuinty, an Irish Catholic from Ottawa.

Anyone else researching names in Ontario, my main web page is at www.bytown.net. You can use the Google Search Engine near the top of that web page to fine surnames, subjects and geographic locations. My web site has 1600 web pages of family history in Ottawa, Eastern Ontario, and Western Quebec, and it's free.

Good Luck!

... Al Lewis
www.bytown.net
Ottawa, Canada