Creating New Families: The History of Adoption in the United States

E. Wayne Carp, ed. Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 257 pp. Notes and index. $60.00.

Barbara Melosh. Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. 326 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

The two works under discussion rely on different definitions of adoption and thus present discussions with very different scopes. Strangers and Kin is the more restricted in chronological coverage, but is also the more detailed analysis of the process of adoption in the United States and the varied meanings attached to it during the twentieth century. While the two works are disparate in form and coverage, they nevertheless complement each other. There is some overlap; Melosh has a chapter in Adoption in America, and she acknowledges Wayne Carp in her introduction. For the most part, however, the two books approach adoption in different ways so that together they provide a fuller understanding of the process as a whole.

Because of a strong concern for the transmission of property to legitimate blood kin there was no legal recognition of adoption in England before the twentieth century; adoption did not become legal until 1926. The practice in the colonies in British North America diverged from the prohibitions in the mother country. Placing children in other families on a permanent basis was common in Colonial America, especially in New England. These placements could be formal such as apprenticeship and indenture which were temporary contractual arrangements or informal. In either case children from one family might be lodged in another household. There they would be members of that household-though not necessarily members of the family. They would receive their "keep" (room, board, and some skill or start in life) in exchange for a lengthy term of labor. Although treated in the same way as family members, apprentices and indentured servants were not regarded as kin and they were not entitled to any form of inheritance. Local authorities used apprenticeship and indenture as a way of placing orphaned, neglected, abandoned, or abused children in foster homes. According to Carp in his monograph on adoption, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (1998), there were some formal adoptions in colonial America, but a substantial numbers of cases did not appear until the nineteenth century.

Both apprenticeship and indenture continued to be common in early-nineteenth-century America although formal education had begun to replace them as a means of preparing to enter the world of work. With the appearance of orphanages in the early nineteenth century, adoption came to replace indenture as the way in which children were placed in families. Adoption differs from indenture in that it is a permanent transfer of custody (and responsibility) from a family (or agency) to a family. The managers of orphanages moved from "binding out" (indenturing) their charges to adoption. Thus their practice evolved from a contract for labor to the creation of new family ties. At first these adoptions were fairly informal, according to Susan L. Porter (Adoption in America, p. 35).More formal adoptions required specific acts of state legislatures, and some states, Mississippi in 1846 and Texas in 1850 passed laws that established procedures for legal adoption. In 1851 Massachusetts passed "An Act for the Adoption of Children," a law generally regarded as the first comprehensive adoption law in the United States. This law was the first to regulate the practice of adoption and required judicial review of the fitness of the adoptive parents. It also provided for the formal legal severing of parental rights of the blood relatives of the adoptee.

Even as the legal basis for formal adoption had been established, informal adoptions became more common. Best known among various practices was that of the New York Children's Aid Society, an organization established in 1853. The Children's Aid Society gathered up orphans...