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Any of you guys ever run across adoption in your genealogy?
I was researching some distant cousins of mine named Burk. Two different Burk families each adopted kids named Vavak. I found a site about the Vavak family. The father died in 1891 when his kids were very young and I found kids spread out among three families (one of the families was the kids aunt and uncle). A couple of the kids I couldn't find on any more census records. The thing is, the mother of the family didn't die until 1911, 20 years after her husband. She did remarry. I don't understand why she wouldn't have had her kids back by 1900, unless her new husband didn't want them or she couldn't care for them. Widows and widowers were not uncommon back then, but they didn't usually give the kids to live with relatives and friends for years afterward.
My software has the ability to show that a person is adopted, so that came in handy. It is kind of confusing, though. The whole situation makes me wonder what happened in this situation, other than what I already know. The mother had plenty of family in the area, including her parents and siblings. It makes me wonder why she separated from the children and why they were split up. It doesn't make any sense. The 1900 census lists the children as orphans, but their mother was still alive and at some point remarried. She died in 1911 of a sudden heart ailment.
She remarried in 1897 and had five more children, so why were her original children not with her in 1900? Nevermind. I think I figured it out somewhat. I found her in 1910 and her youngest daughter, who was 18, was with her. But that still doesn't explain why she didn't have her kids in 1900. Her second set of kids were ages 4-13 when she died and they were 15-24 when their Dad died. I'm not sure if he second set of kids were spread out after her death or not. I can't find anyone after 1910, not even their father.
EDIT: I did find the youngest, Everett Seal. He was 4 when his mother died and 15 when his father died (in 1922). In 1920 Everett, his older sister, and his father were living in the household of some Rubles, possibly relatives maybe? I wonder if John was sick, because generally adults with kids lived on their own, without another family.
Have you run across any adoption mysteries in your research? Any interesting stories?
Thanks.
Last edited by STLCardsBlues1989; 02-12-2011 at 05:59 PM..
A factual long story made short. My grandmother's mother died (probably in childbirth or the result of) and left six kids including the newborn. The newborn was cared for by a childless neighbor couple and later, with permission, taken out of state and never saw her birth family again until she was in her 20s. Granny's Dad remarried but that wife lived only a couple of years and they had no kids. He married again and had a house full of kids and that wife was so mean to her step kids that their oldest brother, who was grown and married, took them in and kept them until they got grown and married.
A factual long story made short. My grandmother's mother died (probably in childbirth or the result of) and left six kids including the newborn. The newborn was cared for by a childless neighbor couple and later, with permission, taken out of state and never saw her birth family again until she was in her 20s. Granny's Dad remarried but that wife lived only a couple of years and they had no kids. He married again and had a house full of kids and that wife was so mean to her step kids that their oldest brother, who was grown and married, took them in and kept them until they got grown and married.
Hey Cyanna, we can add this to "our book"
Sounds like a plan to me, LOL! My cantankerous great-great grandmother, the one who ran the house of prostitution would fit into this category. I know that some of the children she "adopted" were later adopted out to proper families, LOL!
My g-grandfather was born 1822. He came here, married and had a daughter in the late 1840s/Wife #1 died. He remarried and had a son in 1856/Wife #2 died. As g-grandfather was a sailor, I have no idea who cared for the kids. Can't find them in censuses. He finally married wife #3 (my g-grandmother) about 1878. My grandmother was born 1880 and her mother(Wife #3) died in childbirth. My grandmother lived with her father and friends until he died in the Blizzard of 1888. In 1889, his oldest daughter (born 1840s) was administering his will. It gives the name of the family who my grandmother ( then age 8) lives with, but they are not the people who became her legal guardians. Its a mess: my grandmother had a half-brother close to 30 years older and a half-sister almost 40 years older than her. At 21, she moved out when she received her inheritance and went to work; at 30 she married my grandfather (I have that record and a newspaper announcement) . But, she really knew nothing of her family but her half-brother . They are my brick wall -- at least her mother is. I found graves for everyone but my g-grandmother, 3 family plots in 3 cemeteries. Go figure.
I can't imagine how big the family might have been had not my g-grandfather's wives not all died on him.... he sure was into procreation.
All of this boondoggle was verified by my mother's cousin who descended from the oldest daughter. She had the cemetery deeds and information.
I can't imagine how big the family might have been had not my g-grandfather's wives not all died on him.... he sure was into procreation.
Who wasn't into procreation? Almost every family I find in my tree up to about the early 1900s (some later as well) had a kid by their first anniversary and had kids into their 40s as long as nobody died. I knew one family that just had two kids, but that was because the father worked away a lot. Back then they didn't have birth control so people had to just abstain, unless there were methods I didn't know about. Of course, you can chart certain days to not have sex, but it doesn't always work. If you breastfeed a certain way that can help, too, but you can only breastfeed for so long.
I know my someone in his 70s who said that his parents used breast feeding as a form of birth control, because a nursing mother did not get pregnant. She would nurse them until age 2 or so. That's why all of the kids are about 3-4 years apart. They still had 9 kids, though.
I guess back then if you didn't want as many kids you just abstained from each other. Obviously most people didn't.
Any of you guys ever run across adoption in your genealogy?
Have you run across any adoption mysteries in your research? Any interesting stories?
Thanks.
Not any legal adoptions. I was born in 1950 in the PNW and my birth certificate is very very very fishy. All the info was typed in EXCEPT my date, time of birth and my sex and it was hand written in what appears to be several different pens and hand writing. I have a friend that was born at the same hospital only weeks appart and her birth cert is fully typed as all the others that I've seen from that hospital at that time. My father was a known "ladies man" and had divorced wife #1 to marry my mother who had also been married before. He also traveled alot for work to logging camps and other sometimes remote areas that were populated with Native Americans. My supposed birth mother for over 10 years and 2 marriages didn't conceive any children until me. There are no photos of my mother pg with me and there were tons and tons of her pg with my younger brother along with tons of other photos...she was a photoholic. I have always speculated that the woman who raised me wasn't my birth mother. It would have been easy for someone of wealth (my father) to pay up and have a birth certificate "fudged".
I look like my father, his son by his first marriage (my 1/2 bro) and my father's mother. My younger supposedly full brother looks nothing like me or my older 1/2 brother AT ALL and he refuses to take a DNA test even though both of our parents are long gone. Based on my DNA test I have a significant amount of Native American blood and would at least like to unravel it enough to identify my tribal heritage. It is like a hole in my soul that I might never fill.
I also have a great grand father born 1870ish place unknown that was illegitimate and his father was Native American but I have even more blood quantum that means there are more in the wood pile as we say.
Soooo no legal adoptions but plenty of speculation as to who my real mother was/is and who my gr gr grandfather was and WHERE did all my NDN blood come from.
My father's side of the family was/is notoriously secretive about our heritage. My gr gr grandmother (who might have been a mixed blood too) was asked when she was on her death bed to reveal her son's real father and her answer was "none of your GD business" so she took it to her grave. She disapears off the census records after 1860 and doesn't reapear until 1900 when my gr grandfather was full grown...Where was she for 40 years.
Have you tried finding out who the recordkeeper at the hospital was at the time of your birth? They wouldn't want to get in trouble, but if any of them are still alive and remember they might be able to tell you something.
If you think that fraud was committed I wonder if you could subpoena your brother for DNA testing? Forging birth records is a crime. A DNA test should tell you whether you two had the same mother. They might also be able to find someone who worked on the record, though I would hate to see some 70-80 year old hospital worker get in legal trouble. They may not prosecute after this many years, though. There may be records from your father's employers as to the general area where they logged. Then you might be able to get a name of tribes in the area. It's possible that someone in that tribe knows something, if you can find them. Problem is many of these things that are difficult to find out. If the information exists, it takes a lot of digging to get it. Sometimes it takes the law to help, and I'm not even sure if the law would help you in a case like this.
Kind of reminds me of the stories on the Locater, except they usually have more info than you even do.
Have you tried finding out who the recordkeeper at the hospital was at the time of your birth? They wouldn't want to get in trouble, but if any of them are still alive and remember they might be able to tell you something.
If you think that fraud was committed I wonder if you could subpoena your brother for DNA testing? Forging birth records is a crime. A DNA test should tell you whether you two had the same mother. They might also be able to find someone who worked on the record, though I would hate to see some 70-80 year old hospital worker get in legal trouble. They may not prosecute after this many years, though. There may be records from your father's employers as to the general area where they logged. Then you might be able to get a name of tribes in the area. It's possible that someone in that tribe knows something, if you can find them. Problem is many of these things that are difficult to find out. If the information exists, it takes a lot of digging to get it. Sometimes it takes the law to help, and I'm not even sure if the law would help you in a case like this.
Kind of reminds me of the stories on the Locater, except they usually have more info than you even do.
This took place in 1950 anyone would probably be dead by now. My father wasn't in the logging business but an ancillary business that supplied the logging companies and other industries throughout the Northwest. He was the one traveling not his employee's and since he owned a private plane to fly to these areas there would be no record of where he was at any given time.
I don't know how much you know about NDN history but from the 40's to 1978 when they passed the Indian Child Welfare Act it was quite common to legally kidnap NDN children and babies from the reservations to adopt out. Many of these "adoptions" weren't really adoptions but theft and there are few if any records. In the PNW where I was born and raised many tribes were being de-recognized, their land stolden, families torn apart (if you want to learn more read about the Klamath tribes who were the 2nd richest tribe in the US - their land was taken for greed for an example). They became destitute with no rights. You also might want to read about Lost Birds from that era, my story is more common than you would think.
As far as suing my younger brother for a DNA test - it's not in my nature to do something like that nor do I have the funds to do it. My younger brother belongs to a religious cult and they have very little contact to the outside world and would claim religious rights/beliefs. If he would not willingly give me a DNA sample I would not pursue it, it would only confirm what I already know in my heart to be true and just not worth the family bruhaha.
In the end I was not really adopted, there are no records, in all probability my father had an affair with a young NDN woman and forced her to give up the child and I was raised as his own (which I was) and his white wife's. The power of money went a lot farther back then and many doc's did this with a wink and a nod, with no fear of doing anything illegal.
My father was also a mixed blood NDN through is mother and her father and his father (another long story that his side hid) and I still pursue that line of brick walls. I hope one day that someone will look for me, either my birth mother or a family member, I am listed as a Lost Bird on sevreral sites.
You would be really surprised how common this is among the NDN children in my age group. Some famous NDN adoptions are Chris Eyre, Eric Schweig and Star Nayea, these 3 happen to be much younger than I am and each situation was unique just as mine is and we are still searching and trying to reconnect. I have been working on this since I was in my early 20's. My father's side also has been searched for 2 generations by my LDS cousins and still the NDN brick wall remains, so I'm very aware of the "digging" that needs to be done.
...Have you run across any adoption mysteries in your research? Any interesting stories?
Thanks.
Yes, though one was simply a minor annoyance to me for awhile.
My grandmother's oldest brother left NYS in the 1890s and went to Kansas with his young wife. In about ten years I found that he had returned and soon died.
But his wife was unbelievably hard to find...turned out they had divorced, despite being Catholics. She had returned to NYS as well, but had remarried quickly, and their only son was on the census under his stepfather's name. I gather this latter change was either a mistake on the census taker's part, or a family decision that didn't suit the son, as he did return to his biological father's name in the next census when he was on his own.
More puzzling was the woman on my mother's side who married and had two or three young kids in the latter 19th century. The father died, and I found the kids parcelled out amongst paternal relatives. Naively I assumed she was dead too.
But, no, she had remarried had more kids, and was widowed again. And once again the kids are parcelled out amongst relatives...except one, who was unfindable. So, again like a romantic, I am thinking this poor woman and her infant son have died after the husband. Wrong.
Finally, I find her again. Remarried with her youngest child by her former marriage with her, but with the stepfather's name.
There was lots of fuzziness about this, so I put a query on Ancestry.com. And after a couple of weeks a granddaughter of the infant son she had brought with her into her third marriage responded.
It seems that his mother had never told him he had siblings!! And he had something like five or more between her two first marriages. He came across those who were his full siblings simply as a result of a casual remark on someone's part that led him to them....living in the same area.
They in turn knew she had been married before she married their father. So, he went looking and found several half-siblings, again in the same area.
According to his granddaughter she stoutly refused any explanation of why she had not told him of his brothers and sisters. Nor had she ever bothered to be in touch with any of these children. He and his siblings and half-siblings decided that she simply foisted them off on her deceased husbands' families in order to enhance her chances of remarrying, and simply did not want any bothersome entanglements from the past.
The third fellow she married was older, and not likely to father children and that may have been the reason that her youngest by the previous marriage was brought with her - to provide him with a son who would be oblivious of the fact that he was not his biological father.
My temptation was to blame the men she married each time, thinking they simply did not want her chidren. But it seems hard to put that spin on things when she never even bothered to tell her last child of his siblings - even after the stepfather he thought was his real father was dead. And how to explain that she never visited her children at any time?
The up side of the story was that once in contact both sets of children from her first two marriages became good friends all around.
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. There are no photos of my mother pg with me and there were tons and tons of her pg with my younger brother along with tons of other photos...she was a photoholic. I have always speculated that the woman who raised me wasn't my birth mother. It would have been easy for someone of wealth (my father) to pay up and have a birth certificate "fudged".
