Suffer the Little Children…Orphan Trains in America, cont’d
The New York Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity was founded in October 1869. Within three
days, their first infant was left with them; within three months, the total had risen to 123. The New York
State legislature authorized New York City to provide a site for a building and appropriated $100,000 for
its construction, providing that matching funds could be raised. The project was completed by 1873. The
Asylum continued to grow and eventually included a maternity “pavilion;” an annex on Staten Island;
several departments devoted to such activities as boarding, adoption, and social services; a prenatal clinic;
St. John’s Hospital for Children; a pediatric service; and more. Now known as the New York Foundling
Hospital, the institution continues its work today. Letters accompanying the abandoned children, or
describing the circumstances in which the child had been found, graphically detailed the conditions
effecting many children in the city at that time. For example, a letter from a doctor in May 1873 states:
“This offspring is the fruit of a brutality on the person of this poor but decent woman and to cover her
shame and being too poor to support the children, there are two from her husband, she is obliged to resort
to this extreme measure.” When the Foundling Hospital had children eligible for “placing-out,” they
notified priests in towns adjacent to railroad lines. The priests, in turn, would identify families within their
congregations who were interested in taking in a child. These families could specify the gender of child
they would like to take in, as well as physical descriptors such as eye and hair color. The Hospital required
an indenture form to formalize the placement.
Through the work of these two agencies and others like them, “orphan trains,” as they were called, became
the process by which these unfortunate children, orphans and non-orphans alike, were transported to what
was believed would be a better life. In most cases these children were happy and prospered with their new
families in surroundings that provided adequate food, shelter, and safety, as well as schooling. The process
itself, however, must have been quite frightening, first by the disorientation of a long train ride among
strangers, and then by virtue of visual and physical inspections carried out by individuals at each rail stop.
Siblings often were unable to remain together, and he or she might never communicate with other family
members again. The scenes seem to echo, uncomfortably, the slave transactions of the pre-Civil War period.
If fortunate, a child would be placed with a family. If not, they would be returned to the train and taken to
the next station, where they would repeat the same process of inspection and selection. While almost all
states received some children via the orphan trains, New York, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, and Kansas
received the most; Arizona received none; New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah received the least. The
number of trains declined by the 1920s as many state legislatures began to pass laws regulating or
prohibiting the interstate placement of children.
Does your family lore include a story of an ancestor who rode an orphan train? As you begin to explore
that story in available original records, you will quickly discover that it is not an easy search. Many
organizations participated in the placement of children during that time period, and there is no single, central
listing of children placed. In addition to the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital,
there were other agencies involved in child placement, including the New England Home for Little
Wanderers, the New York Juvenile Asylum, the Chicago Home Society, the Salvation Army, and many
others. There are, however, resources that will assist you in your search.
Ancestry.com requires some careful searching to locate applicable records. A card catalog search for
“orphan train/s” provided no responses; a search for “orphan” provide a variety of orphanage records,
but none that seemed to pertain to the orphan train process. However, a specific search under “New
York Foundling Hospital” did result in access to a database by the same name. The data is taken from
Carolee Inskeep’s The New York Foundling Hospital: An Index to the Federal, State, and Local
Census Records [1870-1925], published by Genealogical Publishing Company (2009). The 13,000
names included in the database and the original print volume are those of children who lived in the
hospital between 1870 and 1925. They were extracted from the 1870 and 1800 federal censuses; the
New York City Police Census of 1890; federal censuses of 1900, 1910, and 1920; and New York
State censuses of 1905, 1915, and 1925. The names are listed chronologically by census, and then
alphabetically by surname. In almost all cases, entries include the individual’s name, race, sex, age
and status. By searching the actual 1920 census, using information gained from the database or print
volume, you may discover additional information concerning the birthplace of the individual or his
or her parents. I searched for any Barclay surname in the database on ancestry.com and immediately
encountered a problem. A Barclay entry from the 1920 New York federal census is indexed as
appearing on page 265. However, I could not locate it on the digitized page, as entries on that page
range alphabetically from Boketska to Brooks. Scrolling back to the correct alphabetical array, I was
still unable to locate a Barclay entry. I encountered the same problem when searching for the Barclay
entry from the 1925 New York State census, indexed as appearing on page 311. This time, it was the
correct alphabetical array on the page, just no Barclay entry. In fact, I could locate none of the seven
Barclay index entries provided by the database. A search for “Barkley” yielded the same seven
choices. A bit perplexing, to say the least. I then chose Amelia Adams, white, female, and 6 years
old, who appeared in the 1920 New York federal census. When I searched for Amelia in the original
census enumeration, I found a correction note on the ancestry.com record indicating that her name
may have been Amelia Mamo (although the entry is clearly written as “Adams”). Her parents were
enumerated as having been born in Italy, although Amelia was born in New York. I was also able to
search in the card catalog for “Children’s Aid Society” and found a database by the same name, once
again with information taken from a Carolee Inskeep title, The Children’s Aid Society of New York:
An Index to the Federal, State, and Local Census Records of its Lodging Houses (1855-1925)
(Genealogical Publishing Company, 2005). This source lists 5,000 children who lived in one of the
dozen or so lodging houses that were part of the Children’s Aid Society, long enough to be counted
as a resident in one of the federal, state, or city enumerations conducted between 1855 and 1925.
When I searched for “Barclay” or “Barkley,” I once again encountered the same indexing issues as I
had with the Foundling Hospital database. The only insight into this indexing anomaly is that, with
the exception of the Barclay entry supposedly on page 265, all citations are to a page where the
Barclay/Barkley entry should appear. Not very helpful, so you will want to approach the
ancestry.com database with some caution.
Cyndi’s List provides access to an extensive list of links under the heading “orphans.” One section is
devoted to orphan train information and provides links to a variety of state orphan train projects as well as
a major online resource, the National Orphan Train Complex. This site provides a significant amount of
historical background and resource information and, in addition, maintains a “Rider Registry,” which
provides an individual with the opportunity to register an orphan train rider, or to request research on a rider
(for a $10.00 fee).
Additional titles discussing the topic of orphan trains include Marilyn Irvin Holt’s The Orphan Trains:
Placing Out in America (Bison Books, 1994); Andrea Warren’s We Road the Orphan Trains (a youth title
published by Sandpiper, 2004); and Stephen O’Connor’s The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the
Children He Saved and Failed (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), among others.
If you are experiencing a brick wall tracing a child in this time period, research into orphan trains and their
passengers may help you scale that wall.