orphan trains

Sent away on an orphan train by his self-centered father Jessie, Will keeps hoping Jessie will return to claim him, even though the people he lives with care for him far more.

Ten-year-old Lucy, an orphan who wants a little sister more than anything, finds a very special one in the less than perfect family which she joins.

In 1923, twelve-year-old Hank and his older brother Peter travel on the Orphan Train from New York to Nebraska where they find a miserable existence living on a farm with a disagreeable and abusive couple whose only use for the brothers is as unpaid help.

Contains photographs, letters, and other documents that provide information about the experiences of homeless children who were placed aboard so-called orphan trains that took them from New York and other eastern cities to families in other parts of the country.

A clumsy and unattractive twelve-year-old, Aggie is sure no one will want to adopt her when she rides the orphan train out west, but when she meets the eccentric Bradon family she begins to have some hope. Includes historical information about orphan trains and the woman suffrage movement.

A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.

When their mother can no longer care for them, eleven-year-old Deirdre and her brothers board the Orphans' Train for placement with families out West, but Deirdre, a talented singer, finds a different type of family when she joins a traveling vaudeville troupe. Includes a note on the Children's Aid Society which operated the orphan trains from 1854 to 1930.

As a child in early twentieth century America, Vivian Daly is sent to the Midwest toward an uncertain future. Decades later, Vivian has a life of her own on the East Coast, and when teenager Molly Ayer arrives to help her clean out her attic in order to fulfill her community service requirement, the two locate mementos and keepsakes from Vivian's past that reveal the two are not so different.

Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.

Text and accompanying photographs present the history of orphaned and abandoned children who were sent from New York City to other states by the Children's Aid Society from 1854 to 1929.