According to family legend, I have an ancestor who—as an infant—was picked up from a destroyed wagon train by the next train through and raised as one of a new family.
As I see it, adopted families are just NEW families for the adoptee.
I guess, though, because I’m not adopted, I can’t truly understand.
I have an older friend who found out that she was adopted when she was in her 30’s. OK. That was a blow, but she dealt with it.
Then, five years ago, she found out that there’s much more to the story. Her mother couldn’t have kids. Her parents really wanted kids and her father wanted an heir.
So they found a woman of “low morals” and paid her to carry the husband’s baby. They took care of her during the pregnancy, paid her once the baby was born and she went away.
Strangely, finding out that her dad really *was* her dad was more of a shock than the news that she’d been adopted.
On my FIL’s deathbed, he broke the news that *his* dad had been adopted (unofficially) and that they didn’t know anything about his family. (He’d been found by a farmer and taken in.) That ended all the research on Ancestry.com... *sigh*.
Kids have been taken in by strangers for thousands of years and none of it was documented. I honestly think that we put way too much stock in our genes and family history. When you add to the random adoptions the number of men who’ve raised kids they *thought* were their own, none of us can ever really know where we come from.
Oh, here’s one more! An ancestor got “in trouble” as a teenager. Some friends of her parents had a son. They forced their son to marry the girl and claim the baby as his own to save her family’s reputation. That didn’t come out for decades.
My Great Grandmother had a similar experience in 1852, Family died on the way West. She and her sister were given and raised by an accepting Family, she was two.