”MARRIED LADY wishes to have care of a child. Would adopt one.” (nydailynews) Ads like these were placed in newspapers all over England back in the 1800’s reaching out to woman who wished to give their children up for adoption, while those women even posted the opposite in hopes of getting rid of their child. This was very common throughout the 1800’s, seeing as how many babies were unwanted. But when an ad was posted by a woman named Evelina Marmon it was responded to quickly, but the outcome was nowhere near what was expected. A woman by the name of Mrs. Harding wrote Evelina whom sounded ecstatic about an opportunity to adopt a child of her own. Evelina quickly agreed and sent her little bundle of joy away to live with the sweet lady off on a train. But Mrs. Harding wasn’t exactly who she said she was, and she had a devious plan which nobody saw coming. In fact “Mrs. Harding” was really Amelia Dyer, a woman who hid a violent past full of misfortunes. (Murder Casebook) She later became known as The Angel Maker. She was not convicted and forced to face her fate until many years after she murdered what is believed to be hundreds of innocent babies. Amelia Dyer was born in a small United Kingdom town called Pyle Marsh in 1838. She was the daughter of Samuel and Sarah Hobley, and was the youngest of five children. She had one sister and three brothers who were all very educated, but they didn’t exactly have a happy childhood. Amelia’s mother was extremely sick, suffering from a disease called Typhus which left Amelia and her family left to watch as her life drained out of her. Both a blessing and a curse happened when Amelia’s mother was finally put out of her misery after the horrid disease finally sucked the life out of her, leaving a ten year old Amelia motherless. Shortly after her mother’s death the family fell apart greatly resulting in Amelia being sent to live
Watkins, S.A. (1990). The Mary Ellen myth: Correcting child welfare history. Social Work, 35(6), pp. 500-503.
Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, since she was a little girl she was always a hard worker and determined to stand out and be different from everyone. Her mother’s name was Amy Earhart, her father’s name was Edwin Earhart, and she had a sister named Grace Earhart. Amelia’s family was different from many other people’s family back then. Amelia and Amy liked to play ball, go fishing, and play outside looking for new adventures, other family’s would rather stay inside and play with toys and not get messy or spend time outside. Amelia’s parents always knew she was different from all the other kids, she always got made fun of in school, and she had a lot more determination
Imagine you're on a train to a place you don't know, with hundreds of other children riding with you. At the next stop you get off and hundreds of adults surround you. You hear them talking and mumbling but you cannot understand what they are saying. Some point at you and grab your arms to see your muscles. Complete strangers come over to examine you and scrutinize over whether to adopt you, one of the orphan train riders, into their homes. The orphan trains are a part of American history unknown by many. However, they played a huge impact in the passing of different laws and the foster care system today.
In 1841, Amelia Norman was a 16-year-old girl who had been in steady employ as a servant for a wealthy New York family since the age of thirteen. That year, she was introduced to the successful (and significantly older) clothing merchant Henry Ballard, and they immediately began a relationship. Dispassionate, strictly objective accounts of the nature of the relationship are scarce, and the available details do not lend themselves to an above-board courtship. According to sources, Ballard took great pains to ensure the relationship remained largely clandestine, financing the termination of two of Norman's pregnancies he was directly responsible for (Jones 178). In 1843, Ame...
Many years down the line, there came into Miss Amelia’s life a man named Lymon
Marie had just traveled from her hometown of Ville Rose, where discarding your child made you wicked, to the city of Port-Au-Prince, where children are commonly left on the street. Marie finds a child that she thinks could not be more beautiful, “I thought she was a gift from Heaven when I saw her on the dusty curb, wrapped in a small pink blanket, a few inches away from a sewer as open as a hungry child’s yawn” (79). Marie has suffered many miscarriages, so she takes this child as if it were her own, “I swayed her in my arms like she was and had always been mine” (82). Marie’s hope for a child has paid off, or so it seems. Later, it is revealed that the child is, in fact, dead, and Marie fabricated a story to sanction her hopes and distract her from the harsh reality of her life, “I knew I had to act with her because she was attracting flies and I was keeping her spirit from moving on…
In her final letter to her mother, Eliza admits her wrong doings. She tells her mother she ignored all the things she was told. All their advice fell on her deaf ears. She explains that she had fallen victim to her own indiscretion. She had become the latest conquest of “a designing libertine,” (Foster 894). She knew about Sanford’s reputation, she knew his intentions, and she knew that he was married, yet she still started a relationship with him. And her blatant disregard for facts and common sense caused her unwed pregnancy and premature demise. Eliza Wharton had nobody to blame for her situation but herself. She ignored warnings, advice, common sense, and other options available to her. She chose her ill fated path and had to suffer the consequences.
Their hearts sank as they watched the child they had come to know and love as their own, be taken away by strangers that they had never met until today. As the CPS worker spoke with Mary she explained, “If you had just logged in her injuries acquired during the accident and told us what medicines you had used, this would not have happened.” Mary thought to herself “it was just a scrape… just a tiny little cut…” Many parents all over the world have gone through hardships like this one. If they even got to adopt at all. Many of the rules, regulations and prices agencies have come up with have been causing people all over the world to deter from adopting.
The babies were given up for adoption, because they came from an unwed mother; such babies became troubled youth, who were encouraged to drop out of high school and were sold to prostitution. “In the 1950s, psychiatrists dismissed incest reports as Oedipal fantasies on the part of children” (Dyk 96). Now children are safer as compared to in the past. In the past, 11-year-olds became gang members, 12-year-olds were prostitutes and middle class wives abused drugs; some of it might still be true, but a lot has changed because of policies and women rights and child protection laws.
During her high school years, Amelia and her family experienced poverty, caused by Edwin’s inability to keep a job. When Amy’s parents died, Amy found herself in possession of a portion of her Grandfather’s estates. Once Amy had full control of her capital she gave some of the money to Amelia. “By September of 1916, Amelia enrolled in Ogontz School at Rydal, Pennsylvania.” She became the secretary of a...
Amelia Bloomer:Amelia Bloomer was born in Cortland County, New York, in 1818. She received an education in schools of the State and became a teacher in public schools, then as a private tutor. She married in 1840 to Dexter C. Bloomer, of Seneca Falls, New York. Dexter C. Bloomer was editor of a county newspaper, and Mrs. Bloomer began to write for the paper. She was one of the editors of the Water Bucket, a temperance paper published during Washingtonian revival. Mr. Bloomer lived in Seneca Falls in 1848, but did not participate in the Women’s Rights Convention. In 1849, Bloomer began work with a monthly temperance paper called The Lily. It was devoted to women’s rights and interests, as it became a place for women advocates to express their opinions. The paper initiated a widespread change in women’s dress. The long, heavy skirts were replaced with shorter skirts and knee-high trousers or undergarments. Bloomer’s name soon became associated with to this new dress, and the trousers became known as Bloomers. She continued to new dress and continued advocating for women’s rights in her paper. In 1854, Mrs. Bloomer began giving numerous speeches and continued to fight for equal justice for women.
Miss Amelia is described as a large and imposing woman who, though she mostly keeps to herself, frequently tries to assert her dominance by suing the townspeople whenever she can. She also treats the townspeople when they’re sick and works to create her own medicine that she tests on herself to make sure it will work. She is unmarried, and her previous marriage lasted a mere ten days before she drove her husband to file for divorce. Because she and her ex-husband, Marvin Macy, were both extremely masculine characters, neither was willing to be seen as anything less than the dominant figure in the relationship. This coupled with the fact that Miss Amelia had no attraction to Macy to begin with drove their marriage to its end. Co...
The Children’s Aid Society in 1854 developed the Orphan Train program a predecessor to foster care. Charles Loring Brace believed that this would give children the chance of a good life by giving them the opportunity to live with “morally standing farm families”(Warren,
Mary Bell was a murderer, sadistic torturer of her victims, and a victim, more importantly she was a child. At the age of 10 Bell had killed two boys before the age of eleven. Growing up in the financially depressed town of Newcastle in England, in which Bell lived an impoverished life. Bell was born to her Betty Bell, a prostitute who suffered with mental illness and her father, presumed to be Billy Bell, a lifelong criminal who had a history of violence and was frequently unemployed. At the time of Mary’s birth, her parents were not married, and only married a few years after her birth.
The wrong motives for adopting a child sets up a person to be an unfit parent to adopt, but in