The archives of London’s famous Foundling Hospital are now free to search online.
Almost 100,000 pages of records, containing details of over 20,000 children, have been made available.
The Hospital was founded in 1739 by sea captain Thomas Coram to provide a home for the capital’s many unwanted children, particularly children born to unmarried mothers.
At the time, the name ‘hospital’ meant any place that provided ‘hospitality’, or shelter. Rather than being a hospital in the modern sense, it was a children’s home, where children received care and education before leaving to enter into an apprenticeship at about the age of fourteen. The education was progressive by the standards of the day – both boys and girls were taught to read, girls were later taught to write and the children were also taught music.
The digitised records, which date from 1739 to 1899, include petition letters, from people applying to have a child admitted, and general registers, following children’s lives throughout the Hospital from when they were first admitted. They can be searched by individual names, and the website also includes transcriptions of the longer records.
At the time, many more mothers sought places for their children in the Hospital than were available because of the good care provided there.
One set of records gives an example of this. They include letters written on behalf of a Fanny Sarah Sharp, who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1863 and tried to get her admitted to the Hospital the following year.
The letters state that Fanny met her child’s father at the household of the Reverend Edward Austen-Leigh, the nephew and biographer of the novelist Jane Austen. She was working as a kitchen maid and he was working as a footman.
In one letter, a James Twiddy says that the “evil” of the child’s conception occurred because she “was allowed to remain up, with the Father, after the rest of the Family had retired for the night”.
He notes that Fanny is “unable to maintain her child” and has been offered a position as a servant. The Hospital can “extend a helping hand to her” by taking care of her child, allowing her to remain in her job.
The Reverend Austen-Leigh also writes on Fanny’s behalf, saying: “Fanny Sarah Sharpe, about whom you enquire, was known to me from Childhood: she was of my parish, & in my school: & was an intelligent & promising girl. We took great interest in her, & she has received much kindness from my family.”
The original records are held in the Foundling Hospital Archive, but the digitised records will now only be available online, to preserve the original documents.
The archive is the culmination of a five-year project, Voices Through Time: The Story of Care, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and run by Coram, a modern-day children’s charity which has its origins in the Foundling Hospital. It included nearly 6,500 volunteers transcribing the records online, as well as creative projects involving modern-day care-experienced young people.
Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine volunteers contributed to the project for our Transcription Tuesday volunteer event in February 2021, transcribing 822 pages of records in a single day.
If you want to help transcribe more historic records this year, you can join us for our upcoming Transcription Tuesday on 5 November.
Alongside the digital archive launch, Coram has today unveiled ‘Echoes of Care: The living history of Coram and the Foundling Hospital’, a new immersive art installation exploring the past and present of the care system. The exhibition at Coram Campus in Bloomsbury, London, is the creative culmination of the Voices Through Time programme. It integrates words, images and audio produced by care-experienced young people across five years of creative projects, with details of the lives of foundlings and their mothers.
How to visit the Foundling Museum
You can learn about the history of the Foundling Hospital at the modern-day Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square, London. The museum is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm, and 11am-5pm on Sundays. Entrance is £12.75 for adults, £10.50 for concessions, and free for 21 and under and Foundling Friends.