Voices of the Left Behind: Project Roots and the Canadian War Children of World War II

David E. Kemp is professor emeritus of drama at Queen’s University.

Lloyd Rains is a Canadian veteran of World War II who came to Canada
with his wife, Olga, after the liberation of Holland. He founded Project
Roots in 1980 and now lives in the Netherlands where he and Olga work
with children of war. Melynda Jarratt is a writer, researcher, and
filmmaker who lives in Fredericton and has been involved with Project
Roots since 1995.

Project Roots is an organization dedicated to helping the children born
of relationships between Canadian servicemen and British women find
their Canadian fathers. Forty-four thousand Canadian servicemen married
British women during the war, but others had relationships that resulted
in the birth of an estimated 23,000 so-called illegitimate children.
Although the term “illegitimate” no longer carries the stigma it did
in the 1940s, it was, back then, a powerful social statement on the
position of unwed mothers and of what their fatherless children could
expect from British society. Marginalized and disenfranchised by virtue
of their marital and birth status, both mothers and children were
treated with derision and received little sympathy or support from
either side, British or Canadian.

Voices of the Left Behind contains the personal stories of nearly 50
Canadian war children who have been helped by Project Roots. Powerful,
moving, and in some instances heartbreaking, the narratives are
supported by archival material and original wartime correspondence
between the mothers, the Canadian fathers, the Department of National
Defence, and Veteran’s Affairs, among other Canadian institutions.
Letters from the war children to the Military Personnel Records Unit
illustrate the historical pattern of denial.

This important book sheds light on a little-known part of Canadian
history, one in which we can take no pride.