Fostering Adoption

Adoption didn't really exist as it does now, but did it ever happen? Oh, it definitely happened. But it didn't exist legally. So I'm trying to find those children who were fostered and adopted in informal ways using things like diaries and correspondence rather than the official records that we have in the 20th century for adoption. That's really interesting. And also one of the big questions in the illegitancy book was about who decides who belongs to a family. And how does that affect a child's identity? Those kinds of themes I'm exploring now as well as to who decides where a child lives and what impact does that have on that child as they grow up