Reply to What was it like in American Orphanages?

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[quote=Anonymous]My grandma and her siblings went to a foster care home/orphanage in upstate New York in the 1920s.  Her parents were non-functional but they kept the kids in contact with them.  It was a big single building dormitory by gender and age setup.

This was in a paternalistic, company town that was highly functional and successful at providing social services.

There was a heavy paternalistic "the kids are better with us" flavor to this process but overall I believe the activist social service agency was correct.  These are difficult calls to make.

The orphanage director took an interest in the siblings.  Two went to college.  All five became gainfully employed.  They remained close as siblings.  Some stayed close over the decades to extended family in the same town (people who couldn't or wouldn't take them in).

I later learned that the European farm village the family came from had a tradition of boarding orphans from Vienna for life/for pay.   That made me suspect that the family had a totally different view of the normality of foster care than I have today.

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