I’ve written a blog before on the story of the orphan trains, a true story which has captured the imagination of several writers who have written either memoirs or historical fiction.
We Rode the Orphan Trains, by Andrea Warren, is different because it interviews adoptees at the other end of their life stories, those senior citizens who are still living today (the book was published in 2001) and who rode the orphan trains between 1854 and 1929. We rarely hear from adoptees looking back on their entire lives.
The book’s format consists of introductory and concluding chapters, and a second chapter about the agents who escorted the children and checked up on them each year. Chapters three through nine are interviews with nine children, including two sets of siblings.
Interviewees’ experiences were varied. One set of siblings was adopted together, and the other was not. Some adoptees had good experiences and thought the program was very effective. The alternative was often living on the streets or in a barren orphanage.
Some riders found it degrading to be put up on a platform at the train stops for people to look over. (This is the origin of the phrase “put up” for adoption.) They say they felt like animals, or like slaves must have felt. (Some of the orphan train children were desired primarily as farm hands, unfortunately, although there were agency rules about school attendance and meeting basic needs.)
Some orphan train riders later reunited with birth family, or in some cases birth parents. One set of siblings was sent to a farm in Michigan, and the New York Foundling Home representative took them back after two years citing neglect. Most have had fulfilling careers and family lives.
The orphan train riders can tell us how their experiences affected them throughout their lives. They have much to say about separation from siblings and about their rights to their birth certificates and history. These issues pertain to many laws being considered by states today, such as abandonment laws permitting parents to leave a child at a hospital or other safe place without fear of prosecution, and laws about opening adoption records.
As Warren points out, the forms of adoption may have changed, but the problem of abandoned and orphaned children, and children whose parents cannot care for them properly, has not.
“Yesterday’s orphan train riders are today’s foster children,” says Warren in her concluding chapter. She points out that the experiences of the orphan train riders are relevant to the children who are raised in kinship care by relatives, and those who are adopted into new families–“the children everywhere who are learning, as the riders did, that ‘family’ can transcend biology, that strangers can learn to love each other, and their their bonds as family can be strong and true.”
Warren herself dedicates the book to her daughter, “whose orphan train was an airplane from South Vietnam to the United States of America in April 1975”. (For more information on Operation Babylift flights, click here.)
Please see these related blogs:
The Story of the Orphan Trains
Book Review: The Orphan Train Children Series, Part One
Book Review: The Orphan Train Children: Will’s Choice
Book Review: Orphan Train Children: David’s Search