Adoptions, ~1870 to 1910

[Erato]

Several years ago I posted a topic about informal adoptions in the years following the Civil War - approximately 1870 to 1910.  That topic concerned the fact that some of the adopted children in fact had living biological parents.

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=648105.msg4947855#msg4947855

I've been looking again at the known adoptions which occurred in that time period among my ancestors.  Eleven married couples adopted a total of 16 children [who were born between 1868 and 1910].   Six of the couples were childless or their only child had died; the other five couples had one or more living children of their own.  Twelve of the sixteen adopted children were girls.  Only four boys were adopted and three of them were adopted by the same set of parents.  In short, of the eleven couples, only two adopted boys.

Is this just a coincidence, or was there a preference for girls?  Were abandoned, orphaned or troublesome boys left to languish in state institutions while their sisters were adopted?

[shellyesq]

Were they old enough to help out around the house when they were adopted?  Maybe that was some of the motivation.

[Erato]

It's hard to tell, shellyesq.  Mostly because of the missing 1890 census, it's impossible to know exactly when they were adopted and how old they were at the time.  And, although in a number of cases I have figured out who the kids' biological parents were, others are total mysteries.  Five of them are just names with no other information at all; I don't even know if their names were given at birth or were given by the adoptive parents.  Did they come from institutions or were they hardship cases in the local community?  I have no idea.

It's possible that some of the girls were taken on as household help but I tend to think that loneliness was a bigger factor.  I do think that the four boys were taken in, at least partly, to serve as farm hands because all of them went to farmers with a shortage of sons.  As for the girls, in one case, two young nieces were adopted almost certainly to help out a struggling family with too many children and an almost criminally irresponsible father.  In four other cases, the girls seem to have been very young [<2 years old] when adopted.  As for the rest, I'm not sure.

It's interesting, too, that this spate of adoptions mostly stopped in about 1910ish.  I'm guessing that this happened because adoption became more bureaucratic and regulated and also because people moved off the farms and it was harder to feed an extra mouth.