For more than 100 years, child migration schemes removed children from their families and friends and the places they knew. The children were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia. Supposedly to give children with poor lives a better chance, it was also a means of increasing the population of these still new countries. At least three of the children were Emptages.
William Henry Emptage – Canadian Pioneer
In 1851 William Henry Emptage signed on with the Hudson Bay Company and sailed to north west America, making the long and perilous journey around Cape Horn.
Despite sustaining a life changing injury, he was described as a “colourful and useful man” in the British Columbia Historical Quarterly, October 1945.