See tag line.
Posted on 01/19/2015 2:34:34 PM PST by BBell
Alice Kearns Geoffroy Bernard, the last known living Orphan Train rider in Louisiana, died Saturday (Jan. 17) in Lafayette. She was 98.
The Orphan Train Movement from 1854 and 1929 was a social experiment in child relocation, in which more than 250,000 orphans and unwanted children were taken out of New York City and given away at train stations across the country and in Canada. The program stopped in large part due to growing measures by state legislatures to restrict or forbid the interstate placement of children, according to the Louisiana Orphan Train Society.
Ms. Bernard, who lived most of her life in Erath in Vermilion Parish, had called Louisiana home since 1919, according to the society and her family members. She was born at the New York Foundling Hospital on March 19, 1916, and then was adopted by a French couple from Delcambre when she was 3 years old.
That New York hospital, along with The Children's Aid Society, had gathered the resources to find homes for children in a movement often recognized as the precursor to the modern foster care system.
"In those early years, with so many immigrants coming into the United States, there was often jobs, no housing, a lot of fathers and mothers died at sea, mothers died at birth, and many parents simply were destitute, with no way of taking care of their kids," said Flo Inhern, a historian with the Louisiana Orphan Train Society, which is made up of descendants of Orphan Train riders and who have run an Orphan Train museum in Opelousas since 2009.
Inhern said about 1,200 Orphan Train riders came to Louisiana.
Ms. Bernard's son, Ryan Bernard, 65, of Houston, recalled how his mother had been taken on as an indentured servant, only to be adopted as the couple's legal child
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
People think they live poverty now but comparatively they live in luxury now. I don't think our current generation of welfare recipients could comprehend true poverty.
When I was a child, I had a neighbor who had been one of these orphans. She had been taken out of NYC and placed on a train and sent to Ohio where she was adopted and grew up. She later married (twice) and moved to CA where I knew her. She brought her elderly adoptive father to live on the same street.
She was a hard worker (she had a career when other women didn’t) but was grouchy and sarcastic, although kindly down deep. During the 1960s she sought her birth parents and found them in NYC, still living in a tenement. She found that she had siblings who grew up with the parents whereas she had been placed on on orphan train. After finding her birth family she found that she did not like them at all. She came back to CA and said that she wanted to go throw herself on her adoptive mother’s grave and ask forgiveness for all the difficulties she had caused while grorwing up.
Finding her birth family was not a happy ending for her at all.
The orphan trains had been a pretty common thing. Generally, the trains went to the Midwest or Southwest; a lot of them had been sponsored by Catholic organizations that ran foundling hospitals.
A foundling was an orphan child, literally a child who had been found, because he had been left on the doorstep. The sisters would raise them and educate them, and would then send them out West to Catholic families who had requested them (depending on their age, either as employees or as young adoptive children). There were objections in the US because the sisters were letting Indian families adopt European-descended children.
The program actually was taken up by cities, because there were lots of orphans, not necessarily Catholic - and they weren’t necessarily orphans, but simply abandoned children. Sometimes it was the death of a parent, sometimes dysfunction (such as alcoholism), sometimes who knows what.
The orphan trains had a varied outcome but most of the orphans certainly seem to have done well.
I guess not every story about finding your real parents has a happy ending.
Before the age of three? You can't get a three year old to pick up his toys, much less dust the statues.
Great social problems with wars, revolutions and poverty elsewhere in the world sent many here to this land. Government checks to throw at the problems simply were not an option. William Booth founded the Salvation Army in that era, many others of social conscience did likewise with movements of their own.
The Orphan Train was one such movement. The Libtards, who are so successful today with their inner cities and open borders policies, like to point to the failures and ignore the successes of these private initiatives. The Orphan Train had far more successes than failures. One of their children even became a governor (North Dakota), but more of them played a meaningful role in building and developing rural America rather than being consigned to a life of poverty and crime in urban America.
That’s a really interesting story, afraidfortherepublic. I rather imagine that many adoptees find that they don’t like t heir birth parents very much, as they’ve learned entirely different ways and values.
As for the orphan trains, I never heard of them before. Thought the headline was referring to British kids sent out of the cities during the Blitzkrieg.
No kidding! There is a cold cruel world out there outside our borders.
“Orphan Train” by Christina Baker Kline is a fictional story about an old woman who had several placements in this program. I had never heard of The Orphan Train before reading this well-written and interesting book. I recommend it.
Kids from "over-run" Netherlands were also sent to Britain after WWII. While they weren't necessarily orphaned, but needed the educational infrastructure that had been decimated by the National-Socialists.
At our local library recently, there was a display about an organization that relocated Jewish children from continently Europe to England in the early years of WW2. Most of the children never saw their families again.
Perhaps the descendents of the original Orphan Train orphans should start a reparations movement. After all, it was just as unfair as slavery and tho’ none of the people responsible for setting this in motion are alive today, it should be good for causing discomfort among ones who feel they were the only ones to suffer in our country.
The famous Mormon naturopathic physician, Dr. John Christopher, whose formulae are known to all health food enthusiasts, came to Utah on an orphan train.
RIP.
Thanks for this post. I’d heard stories of this from my grandmother and she related that our southern Kansas town had been the final location for some of the children. The date info was especially interesting as the way I recall my grandmother relating it as going on later, perhaps into the 30s.
Yes, it was.
She found the value in what she had been given.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
