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Where have the children gone? A family account of an orphan train experience
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1990-05
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Because of the efforts of Mabel, the oldest child, the five Gardner
children maintained a sense of family after the New England Home for Little
Wanderers in Boston sent them on an orphan train to Warsaw, Indiana, in 1891. The New England Home and other eastern agencies benevolently rescued children and sent them west to be raised in small towns and on farms. The Gardners' experience tested the orphan train generalizations that the system informally placed children as cheap farm workers and broke all of their family bonds. The conflicts between the Protestant establishment and the Irish Catholics in the late nineteenth century intensified the problems of the Gardner family when the father died. Oral tradition together with the manuscript census returns, city directories, birth marriage and death records, tax assessments and newspaper articles were combined to document the Gardners' lives. Harsh living conditions for the poor in large cities and mass European immigration brought about large numbers of the destitute and abandoned children who needed urgent help, help which separated them from their families. The Gardner children were treated as family members in their adoptive homes while Mabel always kept their original family heritage alive for them.
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Thesis (M.Lib.St.) Indiana University South Bend, 1990
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