Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social TreatmentColcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
General
Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment
Colcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
Desertion and non-support
Another society succeeded in getting a certain trade union to post a
description and photograph of a missing man on its bulletin boards. This
aided in finding the man. Fraternal orders may be; used in the same way,
though for many reasons they cannot be so helpful as the trades unions.
Employment agencies should not be forgotten in seeking to trace a man
through his industrial record. The extension of the federal employment
service, with free inter-city communication, should be of assistance in
getting upon the track of deserters.
The co-operation of newspapers can be secured to good effect in tracing
missing men.
Herbert McCann, who had been doing railway construction in Russia,
returned to this country and disappeared while en route from an
eastern city to his home in Canada. There was reason to think that
he might have left the train in an intoxicated condition at an
important junction point; and the family social agency of that city
was asked to trace him. No information was secured from the police,
lodging houses, employment agencies, etc., and finally the following
advertisement was inserted in the local paper: "_Information
Wanted_--Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Herbert McCann, Montreal,
who returned from Russia in June, will confer a favor upon his
family by notifying Social Service Building, 34 Grand Street." Six
days later a reply was received from a man in a nearby town, and
McCann was found at work in a factory there.
More than upon any other method the National Desertion Bureau depends on
the publication of pictures and short newspaper paragraphs. As this
Bureau deals entirely with Jewish deserters, it works chiefly through
the Yiddish newspapers. Its "Gallery of Missing Husbands" is a regular
weekly feature in some of the better known of these journals, and
attracts increasingly wide attention. The Bureau estimates that 70 per
cent of the deserters which it finds are discovered through the
publication of pictures. It should be remembered, however, that this
Bureau is dealing with a selected group, who know a great deal about one
another, live closely together, follow in the main only a few trades,
and read only a limited number of foreign-language newspapers. Whether
anything like the same results could be obtained by the same methods
applied to deserting husbands of many different national and social
backgrounds is open to question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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