Canadian Grandfathers: When Migration Ran the Other Way

Most genealogy content, including most of what's in this library, assumes the reader is in Canada, looking outward and backward toward Europe for an ancestor who crossed an ocean to get here. But migration has never run in only one direction, and there's a specific, well-documented chapter of the twentieth century in which it went the other way: hundreds of thousands of Canadians left home, many of them only temporarily, and a meaningful number of them left family behind in Europe without ever knowing it.

If you're in the Netherlands, Britain, or Belgium and a DNA test has ever turned up an unexpected Canadian match, this is very possibly why.

The scale of it

During the Second World War, roughly half a million Canadian men and women served overseas, with large numbers stationed in Britain for years at a stretch before D-Day, and tens of thousands more moving through the Netherlands and Belgium during the liberation of 1944–45. Wherever soldiers are stationed for extended periods, relationships form, and this posting was no exception.

Historians estimate that around 22,000 children were born to British mothers and Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain during the war. In the Netherlands, estimates for children fathered by Canadian soldiers, mostly during and shortly after the 1944–45 liberation, generally run to several thousand, commonly cited figures fall somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000, with Dutch researchers sometimes using the affectionate term “liberation children” (bevrijdingskinderen) for this generation. Smaller numbers were born in Belgium and other places Canadian forces passed through.

Why so many fathers never knew, or never said

The repatriation of Canadian forces after the war was one of the largest transportation efforts in Canadian history. In the chaos of that return, a great many relationships simply ended by circumstance rather than choice: soldiers shipped out before a pregnancy was known, addresses were lost, letters went unanswered or undelivered, and in some cases, a soldier's Canadian family situation made pursuing the relationship impossible even if he'd wanted to.

Some couples did marry and the mother emigrated to Canada as a war bride, a much better-known story, and the reason so many Canadian families already have a British or Dutch grandmother somewhere in the tree. But for the children who stayed in Europe with their mothers, the Canadian half of their story often went untold. Many grew up not knowing their biological father was Canadian at all, and some who did know had no realistic way to search for him in the era before the internet, DNA testing, or accessible military records.

Why this generation is only now finding answers

Two things changed this. First, widespread consumer DNA testing means a European in their seventies or eighties can now match with second and third cousins in Canada they never knew existed, sometimes revealing a Canadian paternal line for the first time. Second, dedicated genealogical effort, including organizations like Canadian Roots UK, which specifically helps British-born war children trace Canadian fathers (and helps Canadian veterans and their families find children they may have fathered overseas), has made this kind of search dramatically more feasible than it once was.

Where to start, if this is your story

•      Canadian military service files from the Second World War are held by Library and Archives Canada, and can often be requested by descendants, though access to certain personal details may be restricted depending on how recently the person served and whether they're still living.

•      If you have even a partial name, unit, or hometown for a suspected Canadian father, Canadian veterans' and regimental associations can sometimes help narrow down a search considerably.

•      DNA testing through a major platform, paired with uploading results to as many services as possible, meaningfully increases the odds of finding a match, since Canadian relatives testing for their own genealogy may be the ones who actually surface the connection.

•      Organizations specifically built around this history, Canadian Roots UK for Britain, and various Dutch liberation-children research groups and oral history projects for the Netherlands, exist precisely because this is a large enough, well-enough-documented population that dedicated support networks have formed around it.

A gentle note

This is a search that often carries real emotional weight on both sides, for a European descendant wondering why a father never returned, and for a Canadian family that may be encountering a sibling, half-sibling, or cousin they never knew existed. There's no obligation to pursue it quickly, or at all, and it's worth having support in place, whether that's family, a therapist, or simply time, before and during a search like this. Many who've gone through it describe it as one of the most significant discoveries of their life, but “significant” cuts in more than one direction, and it's fine to move at whatever pace feels right.