2/9/2024
Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children. transported more than 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children between the ages of 2 and 14. Some children were orphaned when their parents died in epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever or the flu.[1] Others were abandoned due to poverty, illness, or addiction The phrase "orphan train" was first used in 1854.Many teenage boys and girls went to orphan train sponsoring organizations simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city. Most children on the trains were white. Prospective parents could choose to take a single child, separating siblings .Average of 3,000 children via train each year from 1855 to 1875. Children were not sent to the southern states, as Brace was an ardent abolitionist. Many rural people viewed the orphan train children with suspicion, as the incorrigible offspring of drunkards and prostitutes. The majority of children under fourteen were leading satisfactory lives. Charles Loring Brace's notion that children are better cared for by families than in institutions is the most basic tenet of present-day foster care
Very much like On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry,
Orphan Train opens with Vivian Daly, now aged 91, sitting in her home in Maine 2011. Molly is an orphan who is in the foster system she gets into trouble and has to do community work so she is helping Vivian go through her attic and sorting Vivian's past. Later she discovers that Vivian was on Orphan Train child.
Another story starts in of 1929 Naanh and her family have immigrated from Galway Ireland to New York city. There is a fire in the tenement, killing her family and she is taken over by Children's Aid who send orphan children out of the city to the Midwest for adoption. She is given a baby Carmine to look after as she is skilled with looking after he younger siblings. She an the boy Dutchy get on well.
The greatest demand is for small babies by childless couples. Then young boys are wanted by farmers on their farms and Naanh is taken by a couple who have a cottage industry of dress making. She and Dutchy promise that they will find each other.
In Minneapolis area children are supposed to be sent to school and brought up a devout Christians but there is no implementation of the rules. Naanh is given the name Dorothy and becomes a skilled seamstress but gets no schooling . The fall of Wall street and the depression result in the collapse of this factory and she is returned to the Child Aid Agent. Then is put on a farm with poverty, an incapable sick mother with lots of children. She is sent to school but on the farm she suffers, from the dirt , hunger a lice outbreak where they shave off all their hair. Eventually the farmer tries to rape her and the wife packs her off in the middle of the night and she takes refuge at the school.
Dorothy's teacher's landlady places her with a couple who lost their only daughter to diphtheria. She goes to school, helps run their store and is adopted by this couple and takes on the name Vivian of their dead daughter.
On an outing Duchy recognizes her orange hair and freckles and they get married he is a musician and a music teacher, but after Pearl Harbour he goes off to war and dies in action.
Molly now is looked after by the 90 year old rich Vivian and it through Molly that Vivian's story is put together. With computerization one is able to trace what happened to Naanh's sister Maisie who was adopted by the neighbour and had children and grandchildren.
Home Children from the British Isles.
1869, Annie Mc Pherson founded a child migration scheme, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The program was largely discontinued in the 1930s but not entirely terminated until the 1970s.
In the 18th century, labour shortages in the overseas colonies also encouraged the transportation of children for work in the Americas,
"The Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy through the reformation and emigration of children." In 1832, the first group of children was sent to the Cape Colony in South Africa and the Swan River Colony in Australia, and in 1833, 230 children were shipped to Toronto and New Brunswick in Canada.
2011 Home Children, Canada claimed that one in ten Canadians is a descendant of a home child.
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