Book Review – The Orphan Train – a Novel
Author: Christina Baker Kline
Publisher: Harper Collins, 2012, 290 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-0-06-195072-8
Although this is a work of fiction, genealogists will find solid value in this book. The author plays with the perspective of an aging widow, living alone in a huge Maine mansion with her lifetime collection of belongings stored in the attic. Alternating, she takes us back to a shocked young 7-year-old girl, all alone, loaded on a train heading west from New York City.
The woman, one of the Orphan Train survivors, hires a young local indigenous girl to help her sort through the attic loaded with boxes and trunks.
As she works through the collection, the stories spill out of her life which began in County Galway in Ireland, emigrating to New York where her family is wiped out in a fire, leaving her an orphan. With 10,000 orphans on the streets of New York at the beginning of the Great Depression, aid agencies were hard pressed to deal with such numbers. A scheme was developed to put these children on trains heading west where they might be adopted by farm families along the way.
Stopping at each station along the way to the west coast, the children were often lined up on the station platform and people could examine and select what they wanted. In most cases, farmers wanted free farm labor or housekeeping assistants. Some children were lucky, but many were abused and mistreated. Paperwork was minimal and oversight also sparing, if at all. The children’s names were changed and many simply disappeared from record. In all cases, they were looked down upon as the detritus of society.
While the story is fictional, the characterizations are more than real. The book does supply several important references for researchers and a collection of photographs of some of the children and the times.
Ron Gilmore
Last Updated: May 31, 2022
Email: rvg3@me.com
Website: https://rgenealogy.ca