JÄRNVÄGSSTATIONEN

The ORPHAN TRAIN MOVEMENT occurred in the late 19th, early 20th century, [1856-1930] when approximately 200 thousand ORPHANS from New York were placed out west by railroad to rural towns and farm communities in Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Arkansas and Nebraska among others. Orphan Trains stopped at more than 45 states across the country as well as Canada and Mexico. In some scenarios, children found homes, in others, they served as farm and domestic labour. 1

The estimated 30,000 children children ranged in age from about 6 to 18 and were homeless or neglected, living in New York City's streets and slums. 5 The term ORPHAN is misleading as many of the children were not orphans or abandoned but illegitimate and/or destitute. 2

PLACING OUT was given form by the founder of the New York Children’s Aid Society [1853], American social reformer, Charles Loring Brace. [1826-1890] Brace was determined to give children gainful work, education, and a wholesome family atmosphere by placing them with families in the West. He believed that institutional care stunted and destroyed children and that the Orphan Train displacement, provided an alternative to life living on New York City streets. 5

Brace’s views of children living on the street or in squallid conditions also reveals the influence of SOCIAL DARWINISM as he has described them as an underclass; as less than human; as street-rats.

The "dangerous classes" of New York are mainly American-born, but the children of Irish and German immigrants…

There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home, and "flirt" from attic to attic, and cellar to cellar; there are other thousands more or less connected with criminal enterprises; and still other tens of thousands, poor, hard-pressed, and depending for daily bread on the day's earnings, swarming in tenement-houses, who behold the gilded rewards of toil all about them, but are never permitted to touch them.

(…) Herding together, they soon began to form an unconscious society for vagrancy and idleness. Finding that work brought but poor pay, they tried shorter roads to getting money by petty [sic] thefts, in which they were very adroit. Even if they earned a considerable sum by a lucky day's job, they quickly spent it in gambling, or for some folly. The police soon knew them as "street-rats"; but, like the rats, they were too quick and cunning to be often caught in their petty plunderings, so they gnawed away at the foundations of society undisturbed. 4

As mores changed, including the concepts of children's rights and parental responsibility, so did the Children's Aid Society. After years of placing children with families in the West through the Orphan Trains, in 1923 the CAS created a formalized foster care department, which included permanent adoption services. The agency initiated what is now its current policy of placing foster children with families locally. 5

SEALED HISTORY

Record keeping of genealogical history was loose and in the spirit of modern day America — home of the self-made man — the relocated children were expected to start over in a new life and forget the past, with little or no contact with their biological families.

A need for secrecy was often warranted by the long illustrious stigma of bastardy. Today in Canada, adoptees’ birth records are still sealed, even though the social stigma of illegitimacy is no longer as powerful. This is a result in part of the environmentalism of the 50‘s — where environment was thought to overcome heredity — which allowed for a closed adoption system based on secrecy and denial. It was believed that only a clean break with the past would allow the birthparent to MOVE ON, for the adoptee to settle into her/his new home and allow the adoptive parents to bond with their child.

Despite numerous studies proving that an adoptee’s psychological make-up is healthier knowing her/his dual history, and the fact that countries like New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, England, Scotland and the provinces of British Columbia and Newfoundland have successfully opened birth records to adoptees, Canadian adoption laws are still structured onto an outdated framework. Support groups of people from all sides of the adoption circle are currently providing a base for political action as they lobby to change adoption law.

1 THE ORPHAN TRAINS - PLACING OUT IN AMERICA, Marilyn Irving Holt, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London, 1992 (p.31-32)

2 Ibid (p.24)

3 Social Darwinism is a 19th-century theory, inspired by Darwinism, by which the social order is accounted as the product of natural selection of those persons best suited to existing living conditions and in accord with which a position of laissez-faire is advocated. www.factmonster.com

4 THE LIFE OF THE STREET RATS, Charles Loring Brace, in The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Among Them, New York, 1872

5 THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY

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