I was watching Unsolved Mysteries a while back and saw this:
The Tennessee Children’s Home Society dedicated itself to finding new homes for children, whether they liked it or not. Led by a woman named Georgia Tann, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society would sell children, especially white babies with blonde hair and blue eyes.
How long could one expect to sell babies before getting caught? A year, maybe? Perhaps even three?
Try twenty-six. From 1924 to 1950, Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society sold white babies on the black market. In nearly three decades, an estimated 5,000 children were nabbed and sold to new families…
When complaints were made to the police, Tann’s friendship with powerful tycoon and occasional mayor E.H. Crump ensured the complaints would be ignored. Heck, sometimes the police were helping her nab kids.
Tann didn’t just settle for stealing from low-income families. She was quick to pick up newborns from prisons and mental wards. Even babies born in hospitals weren’t safe. She would bribe nurses and doctors in birthing wards to snatch up a few infants for her. Said nurses and doctors would then tell the parents that their child was stillborn…
In the 26 years that Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society were in business, it’s estimated that around 500 kids died at the hands of Tann, either through poor care suspected abuse…
The scheme entered its twilight days when Gordon Browning, a political enemy of Tann’s friend Crump, was elected mayor. He soon caught wind of the whole “selling babies” racket and launched an investigation… Tann died of cancer a few days later in one of the world’s worst coincidences. Two months later, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society shut down.
It wasn’t just the mayor, there was also a judge who spent her time adjudicating the children orphans, even as the parent’s who tracked their children down tried to fight it.
So basically you had some woman in Tennessee traveling back and forth between NY and LA, kidnapping children off the street and bringing them to Tennessee. There a Judge who was in on the deal would declare them orphans so many could be adopted out for money to the elite families she was plugged into. And of course she was protected by the highest ranking political officer in the area. She got fabulously wealthy off of it, but when word broke out she died of cancer immediately before anyone could question her, and the judge and Mayor walked away with no investigation or punishment. Where do you think her riches ended up?
We have seen these themes before. And of course there were the 500 kids who died and were buried just on her property. If she moved 5,000 kids, that means one in ten of the children she encountered died. What were their causes of death? Was there any investigation into that? Apparently not.
And that was just one operation in one city that moved 5,000 kids into the ether, with no paperwork or records. Looking into that, I saw there was the “Orphan Train”:
Before there was modern-day adoption, there was the Orphan Train, which transported kids around the country and into the arms of families more often looking for laborers than children…
It was never supposed to be a child’s worst fear. But for the 200,000 children that stepped off the tracks onto foreign ground and into strangers arms, that’s exactly what it became…
Along the way, Smith had offered up two of the children aboard the train to men in a riverboat, who claimed to be looking to adopt. Another boy had been picked up in Albany, claiming to be an orphan, though that was never verified…
Out of the 45 children who arrived on the Orphan Train, only eight were left by the end of the day. Those eight were sent alone on a train to Iowa, where they were placed in a local orphanage. The reverend who ran the orphanage claimed they were adopted, though no records exist to prove it.
Over the next 75 years, more than 200,000 children were moved from New York City to towns not only across the Midwest but in Canada and Mexico as well…
Though the trains were called “Orphan Trains,” many of the children weren’t orphans at all – at least 25 percent of them had two living parents still in the city.
On top of that, most of the children who found themselves on the train were forced apart from any siblings or friends that they were traveling with. If a family at the train’s destination only wanted one child, they didn’t take into account the fact that the child had living relatives, sometimes sitting right next to them.
Does anyone really believe kids were adopted into Mexico, and third world where they didn’t speak the language, for their own good? Did the adoption agents even speak Spanish? How were those deals arranged back then given the language barrier?
Of course, it is worth noting today that in America today, 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States – roughly 2,000 per day. From here:
of the 797,500 children reported missing in a one-year period, 203,900 were abducted by family members and 58,200 were abducted by non-relatives. One-hundred and fifteen were classified as being taken by a stranger.
That leaves 535,285 children who were reported missing, but who were not taken my a relative, a non-relative, or a stranger. The article completely ignores the discrepancy in the math, and does not bother to resolve the status of those remaining half a million cases.
What pisses you off is you know the psychologies that would exploit this, and their victimology. The kids who would be taken and receive the worst outcomes would be the most innocent and kind. When seeking victims to destroy, the evil always give their own a pass.
Regardless, this all may go back much farther than we would believe.
Bring on the cleansing.
Spread r/K Theory, because sometimes a flood is a good thing.
Many years ago I watched a documentary on the orphan train. Testimonies and interviews of the then-elderly orphans made this documentary a moving experience, at least for me.
The adult-orphans interviewed described their experience as mostly positive, yet they hinted at the fate of a few abused or over-worked kids. Most had been adopted into rural families in the Midwest. From what I recall, the train left NYC and traveled westward, stopping at small towns in which the locals (presumably told, in advance, that the train would be coming), would choose the kids they wanted. There were no papers … no references … no checking-up on the motives or background of the adults who “adopted” these kids, yet, perhaps because our country was mostly decent at that time, most of the kids seem to have been adopted into decent homes.
They came from recent immigrants, or down-on-their-luck families in NYC who had been unable to feed or care for their kids; thus, these unfortunate kids roamed the city, looking for handouts or work. Some of the kids were orphaned, or had just a mother who died with a father unable to care for them while working. The documentary implied, but did not prove, that social service organizations at that time, mostly private or religious, were unable to handle the huge number of wandering, unparented kids. They were becoming a nuisance; wee criminals in the raw. So Christian groups — I don’t recall which denominations — came up with the train scheme both to offload city problems as well as get this kids homes.
Yes, it was true that families were broken, as individual kids were wrenched from their siblings when adopted. It certainly wasn’t an ideal solution. But it seems that such an extreme solution to a social problem was possible only because the Midwest was populated by nominally or sincere Christian families embedded in a society that enforced Christian norms. Today, without such “sin-limiting” horizontal pressures, an orphan train would be a open invitation to pedophiles and their ilk, who would trafficked, not adopt, kids.
I think, frankly, woman like the TN woman above point to the degrading of society from the top-down, not bottom-up. I don’t have any solutions to this, just observations, sadly, but it seems that the top needs to be cleansed or purged, so the rest of us can live a moral existence in peace.
It’s still going on. In the mid-’90s my late aunt represented a poor unmarried father and his mother in Maryland trying to prevent the mother from selling her White baby boy in N.Y.. The Long Island woman judge put a gag order on the case and facilitated the sale. She was elevated to the N.Y. “supreme” (circuit) court immediately after.
Payseurs were next door in North Carolina.
Hah! Nice catch.
Is it possible that ol’ Georgia got the Jack Ruby strain of cancer? Convenient and fast-working? Or was this just too early on the timeline for that tech?
In the late 1970s I had a concrete worker do a retaining wall and sidewalk at the edge of my garage. He did it over the course of a few weeks and I got to know him. He was an orphan and had gone on many Orphan Train rides all unsuccessfully as he never was selected for adoption. He said the selected children were the lucky ones. When he reached age 16 he enlisted in the Marines and was in the battle for Tarawa. He told me about the long walk in the surf where so many boys died being shot because the Navy had the wrong tide tables for the area and landing craft went aground well short of the beach. Later he became a gunner on a Marine aircraft and survived the war intact.
I believe the Orphan Trains were a good thing as did that man.
Dan Kurt
Interesting, thanks for the input. What I am suspect of is when a lot of children get moved without any paperwork, because not all need disappear. The majority may ust be cover for a few percent that are selected for something far more ominous.
When a country is filled to the brim with those types of evil. Gods judgment comes.
Recently watched a bunch of older episodes of Unsolved Mysteries too. Off the top of my head i can’t tell you what season, but in one of the first few seasons there is an interesting feature on a family desperately searching for information on their father. The man was a government worker who went missing very abruptly, after accepting some sort of assignment for what was implied to be the brand new CIA. His family never heard from the nab again, and never stopped looking either. The daughter speaks of an occasion where she randomly ran into a man years later she could swear must have been him, only to have him flee without any answers.
Could be interesting background on the first spook families.