>> How do you know they were “loving”?
I don’t, but what I DO know is that childless couples don’t go through all that krap unless they really, really want to be parents. I saw this firsthand; my older brother adopted two. Alternatives?
Is it better to whack the little piece of human trash in the womb?
Is it better to have the Gummn’t support welfare “baby cannon” mothers who krap one out every 10 months? To have 10 kids (from 8 different fathers; none of which are present) sleeping on the floor of a dump with 8 different fathers? (I’m not kidding here - talk to any small town or urban EMT.)
Sounds to me like these kids had a pretty good deal in life. As my adopted nephew said once: “I know who my parents are, and they aren’t those anonymous DNA donors”.
Well, they found her in quick order ~ couple of decades ~ she ran off to Nebraska with a guy named Cheney! (probably one of Dick's great great Uncles in fact.).
But there still remained the question of what happened to her 8 children she abandoned for that Confederate renegade. That was much harder.
First the lists of names of brothers and sisters ~ there were several. Then the thousands of hours of digging through the census of a dozen states looking for kids of the right age named Murphy, or something else, or what ever happened here.
Couple of more decades they figured out where each child had gone as their father, a returning wounded Civil War veteran tried to retrieve his life. He'd assigned them to relatives and friends from the war, all without any legal papers at all. With more work the two researchers examined the records and recreated the lives led by those children, then added on a couple more generations, and finally published their findings.
As far as they could tell from newspaper clippings, notes in Bibles and clippings, each and every child was loved by the people who took them in ~ and each was raised up to be a fine citizen and a credit to the community. They all looked back fondly on the father who'd been forced by circumstances of life to place them with others ~ there was no rancor.
Mary Murphy did not fare so well once folks found out what she'd been up to, but she had more children with this Cheney guy, and no one was interested in pursuing those lines at all ~ still aren't.