Orphan Train

courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.
    A group of early-twentieth-century orphan-train riders with their chaperones.

    Photograph courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.
    Notices like this one were posted in the days and weeks before a train arrived in
     town.
    Many of the children had experienced great trauma in their short lives and they had
     no idea where there were going. The train would pull into a station and the local
     townspeople would assemble to inspect them—often literally scrutinizing teeth, eyes,
     and limbs to determine whether a child was sturdy enough for field work, or intelligent
     and mild-tempered enough to cook and clean. Babies and healthy older boys were typically
     chosen first; older girls were chosen last. After a brief trial period, the children
     became indentured to their host families. If a child wasn’t chosen, he or she would
     get back on the train to try again at the next town.

    Photograph courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.
    A rare photograph of an entire trainful of children on its way to Kansas.

    Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog,
     Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.
    A young girl like Niamh/Dorothy, sewing to earn money.
    Some children were warmly welcomed by new families and towns. Others were beaten,
     mistreated, taunted, or ignored. They lost any sense of their cultural identities
     and backgrounds; siblings were often separated, and contact between them was discouraged.
     City children were expected to perform hard farm labor for which they were neither
     emotionally nor physically prepared. Many of them were first-generation immigrants
     from Italy, Poland, and Ireland and were teased for their strange accents; some barely
     spoke English. Jealousy and competition in the new families created rifts, and many
     children ended up feeling that they didn’t belong anywhere. Some drifted from home
     to home to find someone who wanted them. Many ran away. The Children’s Aid Society
     did attempt to keep track of these children, but the reality of great distances and
     spotty record keeping made this difficult.
    Many train riders never spoke about their early lives. But as the years passed, some
     train riders and their descendants began to demand that they be allowed access to
     records that until that time had been closed to them. One train rider I spoke with,
     ninety-four-year-old Pat Thiessen, told me that when, in her fifties, she finally
     got her birth certificate with her parents’ names on it, she shouted with joy. “I
     was so happy to know about myself, just a little,” she said. “It [still] feels incomplete.
     I keep wondering: What were my grandparents like? What did they have in my family
     that I could’ve enjoyed? Who would I be? I think of all of these things, you know.
     I had a good home; I don’t mean that. But I always felt they were not my people. And
     they weren’t.”

    Photograph courtesy of the Thiessen family.
    Train rider Pat Thiessen in 1920, dressed up for her first Easter with her new family
     in Minnesota.

 
     
    Reading Group Guide
     1.  On the surface, Vivian’s and Molly’s lives couldn’t be more different, but in
     what ways are their stories similar?
     2.  In the prologue, Vivian mentions that her “true love” died when she was twenty-three,
     but she doesn’t mention the other big secret in the book. Why not?
     3.  Why hasn’t Vivian ever shared her story with anyone? Why does she tell it now?
     4.  What role does Vivian’s grandmother play in her life? How does the reader’s perception
     of her shift as the story unfolds?
     5.  Why does Vivian seem unable to get rid of the boxes in her attic?
     6.  In Women of the Dawn, a nonfiction book about the lives of four Wabanaki Indians that is excerpted in the
     epigraph, Bunny McBride writes: “In portaging from one river to another, Wabanakis
     had to carry their canoes and all other possessions. Everyone knew the value of traveling
     light and understood that it required leaving some things behind. Nothing encumbered
     movement more than fear, which was often the most difficult burden to surrender.”
     How does the concept of portaging reverberate throughout this novel? What fears hamper
     Vivian’s progress? Molly’s?
     7.  Vivian’s name changes several times over the course of the