Records of St Clare’s (RC) Children’s Home, Pantasaph and Associated Schools
Records of St Clare’s Children’s Home and the schools which were attended by inmates of the children’s home, are held at NEWA, Hawarden. Children were required to be of the Roman Catholic faith and often came from far afield places such as Liverpool and Manchester.
In 1904, the Vahey sisters, Esther aged 10, Agnes aged 7 and Ellen aged 5 were all admitted to the school at Whitford, as children from St Clare’s Children’s Home. They were children of John and Jane Vahey of Birkenhead, a Roman Catholic family. When the girls came into the Children’s Home, their parents were still alive, so they were not orphans. However, newspaper articles reveal a sad story which shows why they could no longer stay in the family home. Their father, John Vahey, had brutally assaulted their mother and faced prison. He later went into the Workhouse and their mother sadly died in 1915, possibly never seeing her children again.
A search of the admission registers and other records can yield many stories about the lives of children who were placed in the children’s home, their family backgrounds, circumstances and the events which lead their parents to place them in an institution far away from their homes and families.
