War often changes many aspects of daily life. In America, the way adoption works changed after each big war. This was partly because war kills many adults and leaves numerous orphans behind. Society must find new and better ways to help these children as it re-builds.

More than 200 years ago, after the Revolutionary War, orphans in the big U.S. cities grew up in institutions called "poorhouses" without a real family. Adoption was very rare.

After the Civil War, Americans were encouraged to adopt children and our current system began to develop. The "orphan trains" are a strange chapter in adoption history. Between 1854 and 1929, about a quarter of a million (250,000) children from New York City and other big Eastern cities were placed on trains to be adopted by farm families in the Midwest and West. Some went to Canada and Mexico, too, and had to learn how to speak Spanish or French.

Orphan Trains
Lee Nailling's dad was not able to take care of his large family by himself. So, in 1926, the children were all sent separate ways, and Lee and his brother George were taken to an orphanage. After two years at the orphanage, the boys learned they were going on a train ride. The train they were to ride was one of the orphan trains, which carried more than 200,000 children from crowded eastern cities to new families in the midwest, between 1854 and 1930. Lee Nailling's remarkable story is told in the book Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story."

At each train stop, the children were lined up on the train platform and local families came out to meet them and adopt them on the spot. Some of these adoptions worked out well, but too often the children were abused. Their new families didn't treat them like kids, but like workers. And some of the children were beaten or had to sleep in the barn. The families were not screened as they are today so the children were at risk.

Many sociologists have studied the children who rode the orphan trains and they found some good news. Most of them stayed in touch with their birth families and eventually saw them again. In fact, some of the birth parents used the orphan trains as a type of temporary foster care. They always intended to reunite with their children once they were able to do so.

The orphan trains taught us that adoptive families should be chosen carefully for the sake of the children and that when family ties can be maintained safely, this is a good thing.

You can read more about the orphan trains at PBS American Experience on the internet at www.americanexperience.org.