A story in the New York Times brings the history of adoption in America into the news of the day, providing a perspective often unknown and frequently ignored.

The NYT article details individual bits of history collected by what was once known as the New York Foundling Asylum, but now goes by the same sans the asylum bit.

The New York Foundling is a 137-year-old family services agency in Manhattan, and its collection of documents, photos and memorabilia is going public.

“The archive is teaching us about our past,” said Sister Carol Barnes, a director of the Foundling, sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of New York, which also co-sponsors St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. But the collection, called the Foundling Archives, “is also telling us much about ourselves,” she said. “It is a heritage that is very much alive because the human needs remain the same.”

At the same time, the history of orphanages in Indiana is now also being made available to the public, as Web sites with photos and information are posted.

Three orphanages in the Terra Haute area, St. Ann Orphans Home for Girls, the (Chauncey) Rose Orphans Home and the Glenn Home, also known as the Vigo County Home for Dependent Children, all have sites dedicated to information and facilities for searching, questions and more.

Few can help being touched by the faces and stories of yesterday's orphans, and curiosity about outcomes and lives led come up as one sifts through the history.

Like much of the world today, there were few options for orphaned, abandoned or neglected children in the early days of America. It wasn't unusual for groups to be rounded up by authorities as if they were vermin, then auctioned off to the highest bidder, or locked into mental asylums with the truly mad.

In some cases, orphanages were a godsend, as apparently in the case of the author of this:

I was left an orphan,
But of this I’m scarce aware,
For Chauncey Rose has helped me
My burdens all to bear.

He left a home in kindly hands
For children just like me
That though we all were friendless,
Still happy we might be.

God’s created many men,
Some of them good and kind,
But not one equals Chauncey Rose
To my childish mind.

He loved all little children,
As every man should do,
And when they were happy,
He was happy too.

When life’s winter draweth nigh,
Midst its chilling winds and snows,
We’ll think of days gone by
And our good friend, Chauncey Rose

By Dorothy Alice Thompson
May 18, 1927

Others suffered horribly, though, as America saw the horrors of baby farms, or lost out on the luck of the draw that came part and parcel with the mass placement system of the orphan trains

It was in 1851 that the state of Massachusetts passed the first modern adoption law in the country and recognized adoption as a "social and legal operation based on child welfare rather than adult interests", yet it took until 2000 for the terms "adopted son/daughter" to make it into the US Census as a kinship category.

In between, 1909 saw the First White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children where it was declared that "poverty alone should not be grounds for removing children from families".

From 1910 through 1930 the first specialized adoption agencies came into being, and in 1917 MInnesota started requiring investigation of potential adoptive families and instituted the home study process.

It was also Minnesota where in 1948 the first transracial adoption took place when an African-American child was adopted by white parents.

Like every social convention, adoption is in constant flux and at the mercy of prevailing winds. Learning the history can help us see how far we've come, and for some the look back fills part of their story. Organizations like those above and The Adoption History Project of the University of Oregon who keep the history and present it to us give perspective.

Keeping adoption dynamic and working toward goals, even knowing those goals may shift over time, is even more important.


For more on this from past posts, click here, here, and here.