This is, I admit, inspired by some Twitter outrage about an outrageous comment by a Congressman who is not a serious person. I'm not going to engage in that topic, as people who are not serious people, do not deserve to be taken seriously.
Rather, I started to wonder how many people, say before 1950, and then again before 1900, grew up in a household where at least one of their parents was not their "natural born parent".
I know of nobody in my family, but I'll bet it's incredibly common. And for that matter, as my mother came from Quebec, chances are really high that part of our ancestry stems from orphans on the Coffin Ships. No formal adoption of such orphans was ever done. It wasn't even really possible. The Parish Priest just told the Québécois Parishioners that ships were coming in from Ireland, and there would be orphans on them, as their parents would have died crossing the Atlantic. They just went down to the docks and took them home, raising them as their own. They were French, the children were Irish, but more than anything, they were all Catholic. Their parentage would not have been kept secret from them, probably, but over time, with French surnames, Irish ones forgotten, nobody would have remembered.
Indeed, while I have some French ancestry, my DNA tracks back nearly 100% to Ireland, even though I know that I have German and French ancestors.
Chances are high . . .
3 comments:
One of my great-grandfathers was raised by another family after his mother died. For whatever reason, the youngest sister (a toddler) went to one family and the two brothers went to another family. The father (my great-great-grandfather) then died when my great-grandfather was about 12-13 years old.
My great-grandfather kept the last name of his father, so wasn't technically adopted and went on to have a large family of his own. I've heard different stories about why the children were given up by their father and how the "adoptive parents" treated the children, but there is no real way to know the truth at this point.
My guess is that they moved to Oklahoma Territory, the mother died, the father had health problems, and the only option was to find someone else to take care of three young children.
One of my aunts by marriage was born into a large Spanish immigrant family, in which extreme poverty caused the parents to put up several of the children for adoption. At least a couple of the older children were later recovered by the parents, and then as adults, those children searched and found the rest.
I got to thinking about this, and my family does have an example, actually. And one that should have occurred to me right away.
My father's maternal grandmother was raised by her sister after she was three years old.
The reason is that they came from an Irish family that had enough money to send two of its members to the US, but not more. So they chose their eldest child, a 19-year-old girl, and the youngest, a 3-year-old girl. My great-grandmother was accordingly raised by her sister.
FWIW, their brother (or one of their brothers, I don't know how large the family was) became a career NCO in the British Army.
So yet another informal example. Poverty drove them overseas, but there wasn't enough money for the whole family to move. A practical decision was arrived upon, but one that would be shocking in a modern context.
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