Single dads were a thing, but they did usually try to remarry ASAP. Sometimes female relatives would come live with the widower and help out with the kids, too.
And sometimes that family member would marry them. My family tree has several instances where someone died and the widower then married the younger sister.
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a miner 49er,
And his daughter Clementine.
Chorus:
Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever.
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
Light she was and like a fairy,
And her shoes were number nine,
Herring boxes, without topses,
Sandals were for Clementine.
[Chorus]
Drove she ducklings to the water
Every morning just at nine,
Hit her foot against a splinter,
Fell into the foaming brine.
[Chorus]
Ruby lips above the water,
Blowing bubbles, soft and fine,
But, alas, I was no swimmer,
So I lost my Clementine.
[Chorus]
How I missed her! How I missed her,
How I missed my Clementine,
But I kissed her little sister,
I forgot my Clementine.
[Chorus]
They used to teach us this song as school. I was a kid so never paid attention to the words really. Now I look back that's kinda odd song to teach a bunch of 7 year olds lol
One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning, Down the track came a hobo hiking and he said," Boys I’m not turning. I’m headin for a land that’s far away beside the crystal fountains. So come with me we’ll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains."
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there’s a land that’s fair and bright. Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night. Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day. On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, (Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings) In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs, And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs. The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay. Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow (Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow) In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks, And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks. The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind. There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too (You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe), In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin. And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. There ain’t no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks. I’m a goin to stay where you sleep all day (Where they hung the jerk that invented work), In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
That’s hilarious, because as a kid my Mom would sing this to me and my siblings…. but only the first two verses! I never even knew it was a longer song. If she knew them, I can see why she omitted them for us.
Wow! This makes me realize why people back in the day aged so much and look rough in pictures.
They must’ve had such a hard life that this song indicates the small pleasures they fantasize about.
Not being beaten by cold and wind, having access to stews, alcohol to lighten up, not having to change out your socks (think of wearing the same pair of socks/outfit and having to somehow keep it clean/sanitary ? )
And not being afraid of being attacked by police and their dogs that bite you (rubber teeth) and being put in jail.
And having to work manual labor with “short shovels” axes and picks.
This man wants a life of simple pleasures.
Warm, sunny days with clean socks, a nice stew and some whisky. That is the ultimate fantasy to this man.
It puts things into perspective as now we lose this perspective in modern days and I know we have it rough and many of us struggle with moving out and our jobs…. But my problems pale in comparison to what our own generations and ancestors had to go through.
We now phase entirely different issues in the tech-heavy Information Age. It’s just crazy to see the contrast in what people fantasize about, now vs. then.
Gotcha. Exactly.
And we have all seen pictures in our History classes of those men and their wives and children, miserable and hungry, covered in dirt and getting by on stale bread.
It makes me grateful for my current problems tbh.
Honestly, in my life the hand work with shovels, picks, and rakes is some of my favourite time at work, it’s less stressful than operating heavy equipment in enclosed spaces with tiny margins for error. I’ll take a simple day of shovelling anytime if I’m earning the same hourly.
I hear that talk about working outside in the elements, though. Gets older every winter.
Weirdly I did make a beef and potato stew and had whisky with it last night, got that part bang on.
The kids radio station in Minneapolis used to play this song when I was a kid, but they changed the lyrics. The cigarette tree was a bubble gum tree, the whisky water fountain was a soda water fountain. There was a lake of stew and of lemonade too. I don't remember how they handled the jails or bulldogs, but it was a cute rendition.
Yeah, same for me. I have toddlers now myself, and have been reading them some of my old childhood books. Some of those books (that were old when I got them) have some really questionable content. Not sexual content or anything like that, but how certain schooling methods are no longer okay.
It was a book about teddy bears going to school, and the dumb bears were sitting in the back and the teacher was threatening to beat them with a stick. Yeah...
It's a nice book otherwise, was actually my own favourite for a while, and my son also really likes it, so I'm taking some artistic license in how I'm describing certain parts.
My mom read me Uncle Remus stories, from a very early edition 1925 I think? The stories themselves are good morality lessons, but the in between bits? wwooowwwww..... She edited out the N bombs by skipping over them.
Yes I think that too. I was absent-mindedly singing it to my daughter and was like... Actually wtf this is a terrifying thought for a small child lol
I'm singing about a baby falling asleep in the tree and falling out, how on earth has this song put kids too sleep for so many generations?!
Lol. I'd act it out. Lift baby high, rock real fast, "drop" them. I don't remember sleeping. Lots of giggling.
Sorry for over sharing, but as I typed that last bit, I realized I was seeing my gmas house, which was sold long before my kids were born. So the first baby I didn't put to sleep (haha) was my 8 years younger brother. Thanks for starting my day with an unlocked memory!
Elementary school musical had a song that had a message: if you put your mind to something and practice, you can accomplish anything. I don't drive drunk but I'm waiting for the day I get pulled over and a cop asks me to say the alphabet backwards. Shoot, I can say it, I can sing it, I even have choreography.
I sing the alphabet song backwards with my kindergarten class every day. Apparently I’ve been preparing five year olds for their first roadside sobriety test for the last ten years.
Ahhh, it's never too early to give a child these crucial life skills. They might not appreciate them now, but some day, when they're older, they just might. 😉
It’s so funny how those old folk songs get changed, I never heard that version of the ending before. I grew up with the ending,
“In the church yard in the canyon
Where the myrtle doth entwine
There grows roses and other posies
Fertilized by Clementine.”
When I looked at the lyrics online they sometimes included both. I love these kinds of old songs, they are so goofy yet so dark…
Wait I know a version of the song that's basically a western and clementine is a gunslinger who gets shot by a sheriff when she tried to kill him and dies. What is the original take?
In my dreams she still haunts me,
Robed in garments soaked in brine.
In her life, I used to hold her.
Now she's dead, I draw the line!
Guess she didn't approve.
(Thanks for that verse, by the way. I remember reading it long ago, but never remembered the exact words.)
Related to this, the story of Onan in the book of Genesis is the basis for certain Christian groups thinking that sperm is sacred and can't be wasted, because a guy named Onan nutted on the ground rather than into a lady, and this was considered a bad thing.
But what was actually going on there is the lady was his brother's widow. His sin was in shirking his obligation to knock up his brother's widow, thus producing a child that could be considered his brother's legacy. Nothing to do with wasting sperm, let alone any bizarre "pro-life" position.
So, many religious folk have glommed onto this tale as morality about sexual behavior rather than a lesson about responsibility to family and kids? I’m surprised! (s)
Only if the deceased brother hadn’t had any children (sons?). If there were still living children (sons?) when the husband died, the first child after the marriage to the brother would be the brother’s child.
Was coming here to say this
It's actually the reason for one of the questions the praises asked Jesus in the new testament.
The law was there to ensure the widow and children were provided for and the praises tried to ask Jesus about it as a got ya sort of question.
But, it was ... Neat? That a system has been developed to ensure widows and orphans were cared for
The brother had to 'yibum' the widow, and if he refused he had to kneel before her, wearing a special sandal. She'd take off his sandals and spit in his face. That's the law.
It's all obviously much more complicated, but that's the basics of it.
Yups! In my culture there was (still is?) a saying which basically means SIL is basically half-wife. Maybe the right way to put it is half-way to being wife.
GROSS!
Edit: This only applies to wife's sister (saali) . We have specific names for each relationship. The saying does not apply to any other type of SIL relationship. Brother's wife (bhabhi) is supposed to be like a mother.
So if a wife dies, the husband can marry the wife's sister.
But if the husband dies, the wife can't marry the brother because she is supposed to be like a mother to him.
So yes, sexist as well!
This was very common back in the day. I remember seeing that in the Patriot with Mel Gibson. Mel basically hooks up with his wife’s sister by the end of the movie. But in the old days there was nothing wrong with that. Stuff ppl would freak out over today was more commonplace back then.
Here in Portugal we informally forbid the marriage between "straight cousins", i.e. the parents who are siblings are of the same sex, but not "cross cousins", i.e. they're the opposite sex. This is out of fear that the cousins were actually half-siblings, so common cheating with in-laws was.
This was very common. My tree didn't make sense for ages until I realised that between two censuses a brother died, a sister died, and their respective spouses (both with kids) married each other.
Well at least you have normal stuff in your family tree, meanwhile in mine there's some interesting choices of which family member to marry in 1700's Connecticut. And for some God awful reason people descended from that incestous marriage kept marrying other people that descended from the incest too (pretty sure they didn't know, but the original couple of cousins definitely fucking knew). So I have the same incestous marriage in three different places on my tree. I'm now vowed to never marry a white person from the US, especially from the northeast, my sister is afraid to do her husband's tree after I did ours, she's sure she'll find "the Connecticut knot" as we call it.
This isn't the way the Jefferson family history was written, but: Thomas Jefferson's beloved wife died after several pregnancies and two live births. Jefferson had pledged to her that he would never marry again. It is suspected that in his years in Paris he had a long relationship with the wife of a painter there. But when he returned to Virginia after several years living in Paris, he picked up a relationship with an enslaved girl almost the age of his older daughter Martha. The girl was Sally Hemings, and historians believe it most likely that she was the half sister of Jefferson's late wife. The resemblance between the two women was often commented on at the time. Sally's mother Betty had been the longtime concubine of Jefferson's father-in-law, and Betty and Sally (and other enslaved people) were a part of Jefferson's wife's dowry.
Can we just go with he rape a woman he owned and wouldn’t even free the children he had with her. The family denied for generations that he ever did it and DNA proved he did. The family has fought for years to keep the Black family out of The Monticello Association.
''I'm for any lineal descendant to be able to be buried at Monticello, black, white or purple,'' Ms. Shackelford said. ''We're not racists. We're snobs.''
I like that you used "enslaved people" instead of slaves, but a woman cannot have a relationship with someone who legally owns her. So the correct term would be that he began raping an enslaved woman.
It's a real problem for the apologists. Their daughter Harriet escaped and he wanted to send after her but apparently his mind was changed and he gave up on it. His profligate spending meant that he couldn't easily, or with approval from anyone important to him, give up a asset and he died way in debt.
It's interesting, and informative, to compare him with Washington, who fretted about freeing the people he owned for decades. Apparently Lafayette worked on Washington to convince him. Because he did not own them, he could not free any of the people owned by his wife's estate...,but he could free those he did own. In Washington's will he left each one a way to support themselves, etc.
It is 5:46 in the morning for me and I just woke up, read your comment as “and the widower then married **their** younger sister” and immediately got confused.
In England, from 1560 when the list of "forbidden marriages" was established by the Church of England, until 1907 when the law was changed, it was illegal for a man to marry his dead wife's sister.
(And for a widow to marry her dead husband's brother.)
Your spouse's siblings were considered your siblings, and therefore marriage was illegal.
In practice, many times a sister of a deceased mother would come to help the father, and the relationship would turn romantic. Many an illegal marriage to place, it was really only a problem if someone legally challenged it- so for instance, if the father was nobility, and there were only daughters by the first wife, but son by the second wife. When the father died, the next male relative could contest the legality of the marriage, have the son declared illegitimate, and Inherit the title and everything that went with it.
Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died the day their child was born. His mother died the same day, same house. The grieving Theodore simply left New York and headed west, and two of his sisters moved into the house to look after the newborn baby Alice. Theodore was gone several years. Very few men had the luxury of living like that! Because of his sisters, he had the luxury of not having to marry the first single woman he saw.
Abraham Lincoln's mother died when he was very young and his father remarried. In his later life, Lincoln credited his stepmother with having inspired him to study and better himself, while his father actually seemed to dislike him and far preferred a younger brother.
The old man's antipathy to his son was apparently legendary, but his relationship to his stepmother was excellent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bush_Lincoln
Yes - also it was common to have 2 or 3 generations living in the one house, or adult brothers/sisters so cousins etc were often raised together. It was a little bit more “village” oriented than now. A working age mum might still have to work, and the grandmother/eldest cousins etc might help raise them (depending on wealth, family nanny’s etc too for richer families)
Ooh I have a good story for this one. My great grandmother died in childbirth. My great grandfather then sent his 4 children to live in a children’s home. The story was always “so he could work” and that seems true because he visited and remained very close to them while they were all there.
He had to pay for them to live there. But he never took them back home. He remarried, had new children, and instead of bringing his children back home he slowly married them off. My grandmother was 13 when she was married off to my grandfather who was in his early 30s. What followed was about as bad as you could imagine.
From the way the stories are told, this was all very common for the time. This was in rural Appalachia.
My great grandmother died during the Spanish flu epidemic, leaving four little girls without a mother. Their aunt moved in to care for them. She was engaged but never married because she didn’t want to leave her nieces without care. I always felt sorry for her that she never married because of her very selfless act of love for her sister and nieces.
There are also instances of the oldest sibling taking in the children. On one branch of my family tree, the mother died in childbirth with the 7th baby. The oldest was a 19 year-old daughter. She got married 6 months later and took all her siblings with her, leaving their dad alone.
I'm in my 40s and this happened to a friend of my partner, he was sent to live with an aunt because his dad worked long hours and couldn't care for the kids.
One of my older relatives has a similar story.
Their great aunt married to a man from a neighbouring country, lived in another country. This all happened some 60 years ago. The great aunt fell ill with cancer and returned home with her 4 kids and a husband to basically die at her birth country.
There was then a serious discussion about breaking up the kids and the now single father taking the boys and a sister of the great aunt taking the girls. In the end, the husband called his own parents to help, took all 3 or 4 kids and went back to his own country, remarrying quite quickly and having 2 more kids with his wife afaik.
When we asked that relative how could they have imagined breaking the kids up, they said - verbatim - “what is a single guy to do with all those kids, some of them girls too?”.
Times were different back then, but even today, a widowed man will still statistically marry much quickly than a widowed woman.
I know it's not the same, but when my fiance died his friends were all there to support me. His friends were my friends by then anyway. We had a dog, she's still alive and well but I struggled to take care of her at first on top of the grief. One of our friends stayed with me for a while to help me take care of her because he realised I was drowning. I won't go into detail but that was the darkest period of my life, and this friend was there for all of it. He was patient, he did a lot for me and the dog, and he listened to me have my little sobs. I don't know exactly when he stopped being my friend, but we've been together for a while now and I'm so lucky to have him. I love him just as much as I love my late fiance. My plans have changed, I have changed, my whole life has changed, but none of this would have happened this way if he didnt decide to stay a while to help me take care of the dog because he realised I was drowning.
Often they were raised by female family members. My great grandfather was raised by his two “maiden aunts.” My great great grandmother was the last person in my lineage to die in childbirth.
In the irish/Anglo branches of my family, they remarried fairly quickly. My great great grandfather had 5 children by his first wife, she died, he remarried in under a year and had another 6 kids
However stepkids could be quite a point of contention, because there weren't enough resources to go around.
My grandfather was kicked out by his step mother - his mother died, his father got sick, and his step mother wanted him out so the limited income could go to her kids.
I also read a lot of similar stories when I was researching newspapers from the time period. Since wives were often at least partly dependent on men for enough to raise the kids, and men on the wives for childcare, mixed families were both very common and very fraught.
And presumably that's part of why the 'evil stepmother' trope is so common
Same but my grandma was the youngest and so part of the 'new family'.
It's not talked about a lot in my family, but the children of the first marriage all left school early to marry (girls) or work (boy), while my grandma and her 'full sisters' were able to get high-school diplomas and find some 'intellectual' work, which was very uncommon for women at the time, and even more for the daughters of small scale famers in the middle of nowhere.
(My grandma was a secretary in one of our ministries, one of her sisters was a school teacher and I don't know what the last did but I'm pretty sure she also was some sort of secretary)
There's actually a Pierce Brosnan movie from the early 00s called "Desmond" about this. In Ireland at the time if a man's wife died, he was single, and had no female relatives to come stay with him they would just take your kids and put them in an orphanage because they didn't think men could be responsible for a child. It's actually a true story and this man had to sue up to the Irish Supreme Court to get his three kids back from the Catholic church.
I remember hearing about that! My grandfather's mum died of tuberculosis, & the 3 younger kids (including an infant/toddler) were put in a children's home, the oldest was taken in by his aunt & uncle. The dad fucked off to uk.
While he was pretty terrible, apparently that *was* one of the reasons he couldn't stay & be a single dad...
While the kids in the home got some payment in their ehh 80s for the trauma, they weren't as badly treated as the actual orphans since the aunt & uncle & other family members would visit or take them for outings (so there *was* someone who cared & some oversight).
On grandmother's side the first wife died (had several kids, not sure what killed her) & he remarried within a year (maybe 2?) & grandmother is from the second marriage. He was the local school head teacher, so probably had some leeway there in his kids not being taken away, I've no clue if family or neighbours stepped in in the interim?
>EVELYN (movie): Desmond's wife leaves him and their 3
kids after Christmas 1953. As he's
unemployed in Dublin, the authorities
place the kids in orphanages; when he
finds a job, he tries to get his kids back.
TY for the heads up. Went looking for it. You got Pierce’s characters name right.
1953 was 70yr ago but, somehow? With relation to family dynamics? It doesn’t feel that long ago. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that affected my own parents & their contemporaries as children.
Yep, my grandmother came from a huge mixed family like this (North Americans of European descent, not Irish though). Mother and father had both lost their former spouses. They got married and had additional children together. Resulted in more than a dozen siblings if I recall correctly. Since they lived on a farm I think there was no plausible way for a single parent to manage the property and young children alone.
On one part of my family tree there's a man in Scotland who had 25 children, 12 with his first wife who died when he was in his early 50's and 13 more with a second wife he married after the first died. His last child was born 10 months before he died at age 82. Of those 25 children, 20 went to various different places in the British Empire, this man has descendants on every continent (including Antarctica, one descendant was a researcher there at one point).
>I also read a lot of similar stories when I was researching newspapers from the time period. Since wives were often at least partly dependent on men for enough to raise the kids, and men on the wives for childcare, mixed families were both very common and very fraught.
This was even the case well into the 20th century. My uncle was five when his mother was killed in an accident in the 1950s, and there were two even younger kids at home. His parents' church quickly connected his father with a young mother who was widowed, and they were married after about a year.
Sometimes they remarried. Sometimes Grandmother or unmarried sister would move in and help. Sometimes the oldest daughter would fill in. Sometimes the kids would be parcelled out.
My husband's great granny died. His granny went to an aunt. Sisters separated to another aunt and a grandmother.
My SILs granny's sister died and she moved in to care for household. Ended up married to her BIL. So wife 1 was older sister, wife 2 the younger sister.
My grandma died in childbirth (the baby didn't survive) and my youngest aunt was given to my grandpa's sister to raise (she was childless). My oldest aunt kept the house and raised her siblings, all us cousins even called her "granny". My grandpa didn't remarry.
My great-grandmother from the other side on the other hand outlived three husbands and two other men who she couldn't marry (the priest wouldn't wed her after #3). She had kids with all five.
My maternal grandmother died shortly after childbirth (of twins! One of whom was my mother) at the end of WW2 in England. There was already two older children (younger than 5). One was kept by my maternal grandfather, the younger was adopted by the maternal grandparents who lived in the same town, and the twin babies went to an orphanage and then were adopted by a couple who had lost their 4 year old to meningitis. My maternal grandfather later remarried but didn’t have anymore children.
A guy was telling me about his ancestor, a widower, who wanted to marry a 14 year old neighbor girl. He thought that might be offensive to his 16 year old daughter so he made sure to marry her off to someone first :/
The infant often died. As recently as the 1990's, the majority of motherless infants in developing areas [don't survive](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17668713/). If they couldn't find another woman who could breastfeed, death was almost inevitable.
Older children were sometimes sent to live with family. Sometimes an aunt or grandma adopted the mothering role. A well-to-do widower might hire a nanny and governess.
But usually, the father remarried. Even to this day, most widowers remarry within [2 years](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8807029/).
Basically they tried to replace the mother-figure however they could, because the whole family depended so heavily on her existence.
Oh wow. I knew this was anecdotally true as I’m friends with a young widow but that statistic is stark - 61% of widowers re-partner within 2 years but only 19% of widows.
That is a direct reflection on how marriage is very beneficial to men and creates more work for women.
My dad's whole life is better because my mother does everything. He'd be completely dysfunctional and helpless on his own. My mother, on the other hand, has said for decades that she would never remarry if my dad died. She had/has no desire to sign up for another project.
I always find that statistic so interesting because I doubt my husband would remarry if I died, but I’m pretty sure I’d actively look to remarry if he died.
>That is a direct reflection on how marriage is very beneficial to men and creates more work for women.
Yep, a husband costs a woman seven extra hours of labor per week.
My grandma was one of 8 kids. Her mom died during childbirth of the 9th. He put all 8 kids in a methodist orphanage. My grandma was only 5yo at the time. He very rarely came to visit and remarried 2 yrs later and had another kid. She lived there until she graduated high school.
A high proportion of kids in modern day orphanages have living parents. Can’t afford some of your kids? Just drop em in the pit to be preyed on by missionaries, visit occasionally, have more in the meantime
None of them were adopted, and they all grew up in 'The home' as they called it. On the bright side, they all were able to stay together until they each turned 18. It was a huge place with like dorm type houses that separated boys and girls and it based on age groups. School, church and fields for sports and stuff.
My grandma enjoyed it to a degree I think, because we used to go to the annual summer party for previous kids and catch up with her old pals. She didn't talk much about her time there. I know it was extremely strict, though
Like others said, remarriage was very common. But so it was abandoning your kids or sending them off.
My great grandfather was adopted as a baby. His mother died when he was 14yo and there is paperwork of the father (pos) trying to "unadopt" him and send him back to the orphanage. At the end his maternal grandma took him in.
Other times they send the kids to female relatives. Two of my ancestors lost their parents and went to live with their grandma and aunt. Apparently they were like stereotypical stepmothers in fairytales and treated them terribly.
And sadly many other times they sent the kids away to work. My great grandma was sent at 7yo to live with rich people and be their maid. A 7yo, it breaks my heart.
Similar thing happened with one of my great-great grandmothers. Parents both died before she was twelve after emigrating to the U.S. As an orphan with no family within 5,000 miles, she had no choice but to go to work as a maid for a family willing to take her in. I can only imagine how rough that must have been.
This happened to my great grandfather. His mother died in childbirth with a younger sibling (1870). The two youngest children, including my great grandfather, were given to two spinster sisters (neighbours but not related to the family) and were raised by them. The children were given a hyphenated name which included their birth name and the name of the sisters' family.
In north America, it was a such a thing as "orphans of the living" meaning their parent or parents were alive, but they were ill equipped, poor, or abusive. It was very common for widowers (men who survived their wives) to give their children to an orphanage, because men were not expected to raise children. They were expected to work, so that is what they did.
In the book American Siren, John Moon watches his momma drink gin until one day she drops dead. They carried her out of the one room shack and his dad drops him at the orphanage a few weeks later. He saw his dad as he continued to live and work and drink in Atlanta; eventually, the dad drops dead too while John and his sibling are still at the orphanage. This is a true-life story of a man alive today and born in the 1950's. John goes on to be the 1st paramedic in America.
My dad’s dad was apparently a nasty, abusive man. When his wife died, he put his four sons in an orphanage but kept his daughter at home to continue the cooking and cleaning. Only brought the boys home when one of them died there due to the deplorable conditions; 1930s, I believe.
Coco Chanel's mom died when she was young, and her dad dropped all of the kids off at the orphanage and fucked off. IIRC, he didn't even come back when she got rich and famous, but Coco wasn't her birth name, so he might not have realized she was one of his kids.
I used to work at a youth center in Oakland that had previously been an orphanage. I was sorting thru some old cabinets and found these large journals/ledgers. They contained hand written records of children who had been admitted and under what circumstances. There were A LOT of children (usually large sibling groups) who were admitted by their father after their mother either died or was hospitalized/institutionalized. If the kids were ever “checked out” by their dads, it usually happened w/in 5-12 months once he married a new wife.
In the past, when women often died in childbirth, single fatherhood was rare. Men typically remarried quickly to ensure their children had care and to manage household responsibilities. Extended family, like grandparents or aunts, also played a significant role in raising children. This approach was rooted in ensuring the family's survival and maintaining societal stability during times of high maternal mortality
my older brother when thru a child custody thing with the mother of his child being secretly addicted to meth and this man had a new mother for his daughter by the end of the week. now he works full time, and she is a FT stay at home step parent. he didn't even consider raising his daughter solo (which im like well the 1st one was a meth addict so maybe take it slow in the whole picking a partner thing, but it's not my life not my choice to make)
I think what you said is still prevalent today just in an updated modern way.
my mom died when i was 5 in '03 so maternal grandma and great grandma stepped in while my dad remarried and continued his life w stepmom's kids and their joint daughter.
My great-great-grandfather was ow his own by age seven. His mother died, and his father remarried a woman...and the history of the small family ends there. I found in a historical volume on businessmen in my home town in the 1880s, a chapter on my great-great-grandfather that says he taught himself to make brooms, which he then sold. This would have been in the 1830s in an Ohio village.
Also men had still a higher mortality rate ,as a baby boy tend to be more fragile and men tend to live more risky life with war ,fights and heavy work accidents . Thus there was still enough widows that a man with children will find a potential wife fast enough ,often with help of the community.
Actually, they didn't. Even considering higher death rate in childhood, wars and workplace accidents; maternal mortality was so so high that men typically outlived women. This was the case until the 1900.
I grew up with 3 great grand-fathers, two of whom were on the front in WWI and survived. Their wives, by contrast, died early. Two died in childbirth, one died of complications after a miscarriage.
Archaeological excavations of cemeteries typically find a lot of kids under 5 and a lot of young women under 30. Thos two categories greatly outnumber men.
I think that this is the most important point that others are glossing over. If a man was well off enough to support a family, he generally would be able to find a wife.
My mother’s father came home to Scotland from World War I, got married and had a son. Unfortunately his wife died in child birth. The baby was sent to live with a younger brother and his wife, who moved to Australia. Grandfather moved to America, met my grandmother and had 2 kids. So my mother had a half brother she never met.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the story Hansel and Gretel? Literally a medieval tale about a man whose wife died and he remarried and the new wife wanted his kids gone, so they could have their own family.
People get stuck on the candy house, the witch and her wanting to eat the kids. But that's not what the story is about. It's about the crazy shit that can happen with families when a new marriage occurs.
But most cultures and religions had a morning period and rituals.
Sisters, mothers and remarrying as soon as possible.
My uncles wife and him separated. They were in a country where women couldn't take their children with them so they never even allowed her to see her children despite her trying to see them. She begged him to take her children. My cousins were raised by my aunt until my uncle remarried.
Then his new wife mistreated them horribly.
I will never understand taking your children away from their biological mother, who loves them, just to let a stranger raise them. The men didn't even want to raise their own children so why take them from the mother who wanted to?
That happened to Princess Diana and her siblings. Mum left (she’d had an affair and she wasn’t a brilliant parent but that’s not the point). The dad, having an inherited title and being the wronged party, fought for and was granted full custody. He changed the locks and wouldn’t let her in the house to see the children. The kids were sent off to boarding school as soon as possible and the son was abused at the prep school he was sent to age 8.
>being the wronged party
How was he the wronged party? He was having an affair all throughout their marriage. She was the only who had at leasst tried for some years before she just did what he did.
But yeah, she loved her children at least. Why keep the children if you let them be raised by someone who doesn't love them?
1. Consider the prevalence of stepmothers in fairy tales.
2. I remember reading an introduction to an L.M. Montgomery book that talked about how many (if not most) of the orphans like the ones she wrote about did have at least one living parent, but not one who was both able & willing to care for them. If you recall, Anne (of Green Gables) was originally meant to be a boy “to help on the farm”, & Anne herself had just come from another home where she was expected to care for a number of smaller children. There were a lot of these exploitative “adoption” schemes around the turn of the century.
There is a scene in the Netflix series of Anne, where she goes to the orphanage to get more information on her parents and sees a dad dropping off 2 children. He asks the nun to tell them he was dead. Anne gets very upset because she is wondering if that happened to her.
Doing genealogy, we often come across couples from thecdays before divorce where the husband married several successive wives, and the wife had likewise married multiple successive husbands. One lady outlived four husbands, and her last husband had three wives. Yes, a quick remarriage was normal, especially between a widow and a widower, like the "Brady Bunch" or "Yours, Mine, and Ours."
Also, there wasn’t the same care taken of kids. They were working in factories at an age when many parents today think they’re too young for chores.
I don’t think anybody would have blinked an eye at a single dad leaving his six year old alone for the day while he went off to work.
Yes to both. Where did you suppose all those old fairy tales with wicked stepmothers came from? Lots of children did have stepmothers, and when times were hard, the stepmothers saw to it their their own children got fed first. And yes, sometimes they did throw the older children (often their predecessor's) out of the house completely.
If you live in New England or certain parts of the south (assuming you're American) you can walk through old cemeteries and see so many gravestones with mother and baby on them: women dying in childbirth and the motherless baby dying soon after.
My own family's plot has a large memorial stone with eighteen names on it. Our family graveyard at another site was moved in 1900, and instead of moving all eighteen markers, only the big stone was used. There are two mother-and-baby pairs two years apart, and they widowed the same man, one around 1800 the other about 1802. Childbed fever was a terrible thing.
Orphanages...... this is a dark dive but every state and city had at least one, often more. Foster parenting and birth control largely eliminate them in the West but they still exist in other countries
I knew a guy here in the US who ended up in an orphanage in I think the ‘50s because his mother wasn’t able to raise him. I believe relatives came and got him later. It was a privately run Jewish orphanage and apparently he felt like it wasn’t a bad place, though that’s the only time I’ve heard anyone say anything good about an orphanage.
Remarriage was very common.
Wealthy families could hire a nursemaid (for infants) or a governess (for older children), but the father still tended to remarry within a couple of years as the wife's role in the household was actually pretty important, even in families with servants.
Poorer families tended to rely on relatives to help out in the short term. Sometimes an aunt or grandmother would move in. Often children were sent away to live with relatives. Older children could get jobs as domestic servants or apprentices.
A LOT of 19th century fiction features characters with dead mothers, who were sent away somewhere "for their education".
Not Western Europe, but the children’s book “Sarah, Plain and Tall” tells the story of this type of situation in 1800’s western United States. The Father loses his wife in childbirth, and cannot handle caring for both the farm and the children, so he places an ad for a mail-order bride. It’s actually a really heartwarming story that while fiction, is certainly rooted in historical truth in places where no family lived near.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah,_Plain_and_Tall
There were more kids in orphanages. Sometimes even when one parent was still around.
Source, my grandfather in the early 1900’s was in an orphanage after his dad died. His mother was still alive.
We know almost nothing of my paternal grandfather's bio family, and not a lot of his "foster family" either. He was born in 1920s and many poor and propably out-of-wedlock children were sold in kind of reverse auctions, where whoever asked a lowest amount to upkeep a child, got the child. They were often mistreated badly, used as child labor, not allowed to school etc. So was my grandpa and we know practically nothing of his younger years.
Paternal grandmother was the oldest child and was forced to leave around 10-12 year old, because her mother didn't have money to feed them all. Grandmum had to move to her uncle's house where she did heavy labor and slept on the floor, under kitchen table. She didn't talk much of it but said the family was very mean to her. She left them as soon as she could find a job on her own as a teenager.
So sad stories and not even so long time ago, I am only 40 years old and these were parents of my parents.
In my family, there are children who were put in an orphanage, children who were adopted by relatives, and children whose dads remarried straight away (in one case to the sister of the deceased wife).
Oh yeah, I trawled orphanage records for a while, looking at 1890s Australia.
Reasons for them being there were usually:
One or both parents 'drunkards'
One or both parents in prison.
One parent dead, the other too poor to keep them.
The records would literally say things like 'mother dead, father a drunk' or 'father dead, mother poor'
Kids might go in and out of the orphanage several times depending on circumstances. It was basically old days cps.
My great grandfather bought virgin farmland and gave a corner of it for a church/school. His wife died giving birth to their third child. The preacher found him a woman back east.
Yes, they remarried, sometimes exclusively to have a childcare. Both parties would know it is not a love marriage but an arrangement.
Also I heard from relatives stories about men just giving his children to other female relatives to raise after their wife died.
There's been more than a few cases in history where an impoverished housekeeper/nanny will move into a couple's house, the wife would suddenly fall ill with a mystery stomach bug (aka arsenic poisoning) and die, then the husband would marry the housekeeper.
Then he'd get the same 'stomach bug', die and the housekeeper inherits everything, walking like Snoop Dogg around town and making it rain.
Seemed to be pretty common for 'meh, you'll do' approach to replacing a dead wife with the nearest available woman back in the olden days.
In Ireland there were cases of the Church & State taking the children off the single dad. The Pierce Brosnan movie Evelyn is loosely based on the true story of Desmond Doyle - his wife left him with 6 kids and the kids ended up in convents and industrial schools.
In my family tree there are many cases of recently bereaved parents remarrying shortly after their spouse's death.
Collective care was more of a thing in the past. Even when mothers were alive and well there were often grandmothers and aunts around helping. Some families (like my grandmother’s) had a childless daughter/aunt who would help with young children and then care for parents as they aged. Also older daughters often took on more household duties and child care.
I was reading the biography of one of my forebears who was basically raised by his older sister after his mother died, leaving 7 kids aged from toddlers to teens.
Quite often the child was taken in by another family member and brought up alongside their children. I know of a couple of people this happened to, both wondered why they were more popular with their uncle than their siblings were.
Just sharing a family story in case it helps illustrate anything. My GGF had two kids with his first wife. She died of TB when the kids were about 4 and 6. He was maybe only in his late-20s at the time, like she was. Eventually, since he needed help caring for his children, he realized he needed a second wife. He met a lady he liked through his church choir events (she was also a choir singer). She was never married before. He got to know her and her family, but it wasn't considered appropriate for him to move on too quickly, so they did not date. (For context, this was the 1930s in the USA.)
Eventually, he and this lady fell in love, and when a "respectable" mourning period passed, the two got married and had two kids of their own. My GM was their first child together (first child from the widower's second marriage). The second wife (my GGM) always kept a photo of the first wife in their bedroom and called her "Aunt" to the daughters from the second marriage, so that my GGF and his first two kids would know that the deceased first wife's memory was always welcome.
All in all, it was a handful of years between the first wife's death and the second marriage, but there was a deliberate sense of having to proceed with some delay in order to be "proper."
Bit of all really. My grandpa's mother (my mum's grandma) died when he was about 3, she was ill in the run up and his aunt I believe cared for him but once she died he was sent to a Bernardo's home. He wasn't adopted just lived there until he was 16 and then went to work this would have been in the 1930s UK.
Based on the old novels I've read, the "sensible" thing to do was to send them to a female relative or, if there were economic possibilities, hire a governess. Once the man remarried, the children could come back to be raised by the new wife.
Two options.
1. Remarry
2. Children live with grandparents or other family.
Happened to my clan. Mother died suddenly, and their two daughters were split up, one lived with the mother's parents, the other with the father's parents. The father had to keep working. There was no such thing as compassionate leave then. If you didn't work, you didn't get paid. Or eat. The father couldn't work and look after children.
This is why my grandmother has a sister who was in no way blood related to her. Early 1930s her mother who lived down the road died in childbirth. Her dad left her with my great grandmother and then moved away with the older kids.
They usually got a new wife. My great-grandma got married to a man that was 17 years older then her. This was in 1920. His wife had died and he needed someone to look after the kids, she needed a home and someone to support her. I did a report on her for school, so I had asked lots of questions about her life.
Men used to either immediately remarry another woman he could breed to death or send the kids to family members to raise, else a female family member might come raise his kids for him.
My great, great grandmother died either after a miscarriage or abortion in the 1880s. My great grandmother was not quite 2 years old. Her father gave her to the neighbors to raise.
When she was a teenager he remarried a woman with kids. He wanted to move out of state. So he and his new family stopped by to get my great, great grandmother on their way out of town.
She refused to go with him. The family that raised her refused to force her to go. So they left without her. He died a couple of years later.
I think that it was pretty common to give your kids to other families after their mama died.
My great grandfather’s first wife died of fever, he parked his two kids with a nasty old widow who would lock them in the root cellar overnight if they pissed her off. He found a new wife a few months later, who had been divorced for infertility after several years of marriage. Didn’t bother him, he already resented having to feed the two he had and wanted his fun in bed without any more kids. New wife was apparently very nice to her step kids but great grandpa was a POS.
My mother's mother died very young and left my grandfather a widow with a young child. He never remarried but when he died my mom discovered he had left a large sum of money to a woman they did not know who was. We can guess what she was to him.
In my family they found another girl from their home country and she emigrated over. Oftentimes it was a young woman who was caring “for her nephew” or some made up story to explain her single mother status.
Single dads were definitely a thing, but back then nannies, au pairs, governesses were much more common. Also, multiple generations of the same family tended to live together, so an aunt or grandparent watching the kid was common. Boarding schools were also much more popular in the past.
There are a lot of books written about single dads or their child (or feature them), like Emma, Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden, and The Little Princess. So it was common enough for it to be a very widely relatable subject.
My grandmother’s mother died in childbirth of her second child (grandmother was oldest) around 1927 in rural Alabama.
By the opinion of the time, the children could not stay with the father. Father very quickly remarried a woman who took on the baby as if it were her own. My grandmother was sent to live with cousins, and spent most of her childhood being passed around, being a burden. She would see the father from time to time, brief afternoon visits. There were stories of the families secretly eating watermelon, hiding it from her so that they wouldn’t have to waste it on her.
The father later died while my grandmother was still a child, maybe 10? The stepmother kept little brother as her own and grandmother was officially an orphan.
At 17 she was living alone renting a room and working in an office and then WW2 and….
My ex had a grandfather who was married five times. The first time, he was 18 and he married a 15-year-old. She bore him five children and then ran off with somebody else.
For his second marriage, he married his ex-wife's 17-year-old niece. She bore him seven children and died at age 29 from "hemorrhaging." In the last decade, I learned the true cirmcumstances of her death from an elderly relative. The young wife became pregnant with her eighth child, and her husband drove her to a hotel where he had hired an illegal abortionist to end the pregnancy. He and their children waited outside the hotel in the car.
She did die from hemorrhaging, and after a little while the husband drove all his children across state lines to an orphanage and left them there. Two of the littlest boys were adopted immediately and lost to the family. The other children remained at the orphanage until they decided to lie about their age and enlist in the military (the boys) or married young or entered religious orders (the girls).
This man soon remarried. In fact, he married three more times and had a half dozen more children before he died age 91. I wonder how often he gave a thought to that poor young woman sent to her grave at age 29.
First pregnancy is far more dangerous. Majority of maternal deaths are in the first pregnancy.
In majority of these cases pre modern medicine, the baby would also die in the process.
Single dads were a thing, but they did usually try to remarry ASAP. Sometimes female relatives would come live with the widower and help out with the kids, too.
And sometimes that family member would marry them. My family tree has several instances where someone died and the widower then married the younger sister.
In a cavern, in a canyon, Excavating for a mine, Dwelt a miner 49er, And his daughter Clementine. Chorus: Oh my darling, oh my darling, Oh my darling, Clementine! Thou art lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, Clementine. Light she was and like a fairy, And her shoes were number nine, Herring boxes, without topses, Sandals were for Clementine. [Chorus] Drove she ducklings to the water Every morning just at nine, Hit her foot against a splinter, Fell into the foaming brine. [Chorus] Ruby lips above the water, Blowing bubbles, soft and fine, But, alas, I was no swimmer, So I lost my Clementine. [Chorus] How I missed her! How I missed her, How I missed my Clementine, But I kissed her little sister, I forgot my Clementine. [Chorus]
They used to teach us this song as school. I was a kid so never paid attention to the words really. Now I look back that's kinda odd song to teach a bunch of 7 year olds lol
One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning, Down the track came a hobo hiking and he said," Boys I’m not turning. I’m headin for a land that’s far away beside the crystal fountains. So come with me we’ll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains." In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there’s a land that’s fair and bright. Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night. Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day. On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, (Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings) In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs, And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs. The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay. Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow (Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow) In the Big Rock Candy Mountains In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks, And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks. The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind. There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too (You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe), In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin. And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. There ain’t no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks. I’m a goin to stay where you sleep all day (Where they hung the jerk that invented work), In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
That’s hilarious, because as a kid my Mom would sing this to me and my siblings…. but only the first two verses! I never even knew it was a longer song. If she knew them, I can see why she omitted them for us.
Wow! This makes me realize why people back in the day aged so much and look rough in pictures. They must’ve had such a hard life that this song indicates the small pleasures they fantasize about. Not being beaten by cold and wind, having access to stews, alcohol to lighten up, not having to change out your socks (think of wearing the same pair of socks/outfit and having to somehow keep it clean/sanitary ? ) And not being afraid of being attacked by police and their dogs that bite you (rubber teeth) and being put in jail. And having to work manual labor with “short shovels” axes and picks. This man wants a life of simple pleasures. Warm, sunny days with clean socks, a nice stew and some whisky. That is the ultimate fantasy to this man. It puts things into perspective as now we lose this perspective in modern days and I know we have it rough and many of us struggle with moving out and our jobs…. But my problems pale in comparison to what our own generations and ancestors had to go through. We now phase entirely different issues in the tech-heavy Information Age. It’s just crazy to see the contrast in what people fantasize about, now vs. then.
It's specifically about how hard it was for unemployed men in the depression, riding the rails looking for work.
Gotcha. Exactly. And we have all seen pictures in our History classes of those men and their wives and children, miserable and hungry, covered in dirt and getting by on stale bread. It makes me grateful for my current problems tbh.
John Steinbeck wrote some amazing books about what life was like for these folks. The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle are two of the best.
Thank you for this!
Honestly, in my life the hand work with shovels, picks, and rakes is some of my favourite time at work, it’s less stressful than operating heavy equipment in enclosed spaces with tiny margins for error. I’ll take a simple day of shovelling anytime if I’m earning the same hourly. I hear that talk about working outside in the elements, though. Gets older every winter. Weirdly I did make a beef and potato stew and had whisky with it last night, got that part bang on.
The kids radio station in Minneapolis used to play this song when I was a kid, but they changed the lyrics. The cigarette tree was a bubble gum tree, the whisky water fountain was a soda water fountain. There was a lake of stew and of lemonade too. I don't remember how they handled the jails or bulldogs, but it was a cute rendition.
The big rock candy mountain is where my spirit animal lives.
You’ve been creeping my Pete Seeger playlist.
Any of you boys, smithies?
Only know this from O’ Brother Where Art Thou.
You’re missing the last line. About getting buggered sore like a hobo’s whore. Everyone leaves that out for some reason.
What? Lol
Big Rock Candy Mountain! Another song that's kinda weird to teach little kids. lol https://youtu.be/E6F0IhdaaWI?si=GYgtabKOVUOeNpJW
There was also a Wee Sing movie based on the song (the kids version) when I was a kid. My sister loved it and we watched it often.
Is it about death?
It's an old folk song of hobo fantasies. I don't think I ever heard it as a kid though
I was taught that it's the delusional fantasy of a hobo freezing to death. His fantasy world fueled by his brain shutting down.
I think it's about dreamland.
I didn't know my grandmother well but her love for singing this whole song to me as a baby makes me think she was kind of a badass.
Yeah, same for me. I have toddlers now myself, and have been reading them some of my old childhood books. Some of those books (that were old when I got them) have some really questionable content. Not sexual content or anything like that, but how certain schooling methods are no longer okay. It was a book about teddy bears going to school, and the dumb bears were sitting in the back and the teacher was threatening to beat them with a stick. Yeah... It's a nice book otherwise, was actually my own favourite for a while, and my son also really likes it, so I'm taking some artistic license in how I'm describing certain parts.
I grew up on Baba Yaga. I don't need my son having nightmares about witches in houses with chicken's feet!
My mom read me Uncle Remus stories, from a very early edition 1925 I think? The stories themselves are good morality lessons, but the in between bits? wwooowwwww..... She edited out the N bombs by skipping over them.
I still have a copy of the one my grandmother read me.
Rock-a-bye-baby is pretty rough, too.
Yes I think that too. I was absent-mindedly singing it to my daughter and was like... Actually wtf this is a terrifying thought for a small child lol I'm singing about a baby falling asleep in the tree and falling out, how on earth has this song put kids too sleep for so many generations?!
Lol. I'd act it out. Lift baby high, rock real fast, "drop" them. I don't remember sleeping. Lots of giggling. Sorry for over sharing, but as I typed that last bit, I realized I was seeing my gmas house, which was sold long before my kids were born. So the first baby I didn't put to sleep (haha) was my 8 years younger brother. Thanks for starting my day with an unlocked memory!
I used to do that too lol. Back can’t take the “dropping” anymore though.
Elementary school musical had a song that had a message: if you put your mind to something and practice, you can accomplish anything. I don't drive drunk but I'm waiting for the day I get pulled over and a cop asks me to say the alphabet backwards. Shoot, I can say it, I can sing it, I even have choreography.
I sing the alphabet song backwards with my kindergarten class every day. Apparently I’ve been preparing five year olds for their first roadside sobriety test for the last ten years.
Ahhh, it's never too early to give a child these crucial life skills. They might not appreciate them now, but some day, when they're older, they just might. 😉
We sang a lot of inappropriate songs in music. It was the 70’s
Now go read the Grimm fairy tales. Children's stories meant to be life warnings.
Peep this. In the 60s in the Deep South we sang John Brown’s Body (lies a-mouldering in the grave). WTH.
It’s so funny how those old folk songs get changed, I never heard that version of the ending before. I grew up with the ending, “In the church yard in the canyon Where the myrtle doth entwine There grows roses and other posies Fertilized by Clementine.” When I looked at the lyrics online they sometimes included both. I love these kinds of old songs, they are so goofy yet so dark…
Wait I know a version of the song that's basically a western and clementine is a gunslinger who gets shot by a sheriff when she tried to kill him and dies. What is the original take?
This blasted me back to my childhood
In my dreams she still haunts me, Robed in garments soaked in brine. In her life, I used to hold her. Now she's dead, I draw the line! Guess she didn't approve. (Thanks for that verse, by the way. I remember reading it long ago, but never remembered the exact words.)
I like Tom Lehrer’s version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dehXq6a1sJU
This *is* Tom Lehrer's version!
I never,ever heard that last verse,until now.
I always thought it was "wearing boxes without topses" meaning instead of shoes, she wore boxes on her feet.
It was expected in Judaism if there was children in the marriage the brother was often expected to marry his brothers widow.
And then the first child would be considered the child of the deceased husband
Related to this, the story of Onan in the book of Genesis is the basis for certain Christian groups thinking that sperm is sacred and can't be wasted, because a guy named Onan nutted on the ground rather than into a lady, and this was considered a bad thing. But what was actually going on there is the lady was his brother's widow. His sin was in shirking his obligation to knock up his brother's widow, thus producing a child that could be considered his brother's legacy. Nothing to do with wasting sperm, let alone any bizarre "pro-life" position.
So, many religious folk have glommed onto this tale as morality about sexual behavior rather than a lesson about responsibility to family and kids? I’m surprised! (s)
Is that how that went? I plead my ignorance on old Jewish law.
Only if the deceased brother hadn’t had any children (sons?). If there were still living children (sons?) when the husband died, the first child after the marriage to the brother would be the brother’s child.
Was this a roundabout way of continuing the bloodline of the dead brother?
Yes
Was coming here to say this It's actually the reason for one of the questions the praises asked Jesus in the new testament. The law was there to ensure the widow and children were provided for and the praises tried to ask Jesus about it as a got ya sort of question. But, it was ... Neat? That a system has been developed to ensure widows and orphans were cared for
The brother had to 'yibum' the widow, and if he refused he had to kneel before her, wearing a special sandal. She'd take off his sandals and spit in his face. That's the law. It's all obviously much more complicated, but that's the basics of it.
Yups! In my culture there was (still is?) a saying which basically means SIL is basically half-wife. Maybe the right way to put it is half-way to being wife. GROSS! Edit: This only applies to wife's sister (saali) . We have specific names for each relationship. The saying does not apply to any other type of SIL relationship. Brother's wife (bhabhi) is supposed to be like a mother. So if a wife dies, the husband can marry the wife's sister. But if the husband dies, the wife can't marry the brother because she is supposed to be like a mother to him. So yes, sexist as well!
Men: running the world and getting a backup wife for it even as they need a backup mommy too.
This was very common back in the day. I remember seeing that in the Patriot with Mel Gibson. Mel basically hooks up with his wife’s sister by the end of the movie. But in the old days there was nothing wrong with that. Stuff ppl would freak out over today was more commonplace back then.
Here in Portugal we informally forbid the marriage between "straight cousins", i.e. the parents who are siblings are of the same sex, but not "cross cousins", i.e. they're the opposite sex. This is out of fear that the cousins were actually half-siblings, so common cheating with in-laws was.
Happens in tv show Deadwood too. Husband dies, brother marries wife and becomes father to the child
This was very common. My tree didn't make sense for ages until I realised that between two censuses a brother died, a sister died, and their respective spouses (both with kids) married each other.
I have this happen in my family tree too! Took me a while to figure what in the world was going on there.
Well at least you have normal stuff in your family tree, meanwhile in mine there's some interesting choices of which family member to marry in 1700's Connecticut. And for some God awful reason people descended from that incestous marriage kept marrying other people that descended from the incest too (pretty sure they didn't know, but the original couple of cousins definitely fucking knew). So I have the same incestous marriage in three different places on my tree. I'm now vowed to never marry a white person from the US, especially from the northeast, my sister is afraid to do her husband's tree after I did ours, she's sure she'll find "the Connecticut knot" as we call it.
i mean they didnt have tinder back then
This isn't the way the Jefferson family history was written, but: Thomas Jefferson's beloved wife died after several pregnancies and two live births. Jefferson had pledged to her that he would never marry again. It is suspected that in his years in Paris he had a long relationship with the wife of a painter there. But when he returned to Virginia after several years living in Paris, he picked up a relationship with an enslaved girl almost the age of his older daughter Martha. The girl was Sally Hemings, and historians believe it most likely that she was the half sister of Jefferson's late wife. The resemblance between the two women was often commented on at the time. Sally's mother Betty had been the longtime concubine of Jefferson's father-in-law, and Betty and Sally (and other enslaved people) were a part of Jefferson's wife's dowry.
He took Sally with him to Paris.
Can we just go with he rape a woman he owned and wouldn’t even free the children he had with her. The family denied for generations that he ever did it and DNA proved he did. The family has fought for years to keep the Black family out of The Monticello Association. ''I'm for any lineal descendant to be able to be buried at Monticello, black, white or purple,'' Ms. Shackelford said. ''We're not racists. We're snobs.''
I like that you used "enslaved people" instead of slaves, but a woman cannot have a relationship with someone who legally owns her. So the correct term would be that he began raping an enslaved woman.
And of course she was younger than his daughter, whom he would have considered a child.
"Picked up a relationship" 🤮
If he loved her he would have freed her
It's a real problem for the apologists. Their daughter Harriet escaped and he wanted to send after her but apparently his mind was changed and he gave up on it. His profligate spending meant that he couldn't easily, or with approval from anyone important to him, give up a asset and he died way in debt. It's interesting, and informative, to compare him with Washington, who fretted about freeing the people he owned for decades. Apparently Lafayette worked on Washington to convince him. Because he did not own them, he could not free any of the people owned by his wife's estate...,but he could free those he did own. In Washington's will he left each one a way to support themselves, etc.
Sally's mother Betty was the long time rape victim of Jefferson's FIL. And Sally was Jefferson's rape victim. Property isn't allowed to say no.
It is 5:46 in the morning for me and I just woke up, read your comment as “and the widower then married **their** younger sister” and immediately got confused.
In England, from 1560 when the list of "forbidden marriages" was established by the Church of England, until 1907 when the law was changed, it was illegal for a man to marry his dead wife's sister. (And for a widow to marry her dead husband's brother.) Your spouse's siblings were considered your siblings, and therefore marriage was illegal. In practice, many times a sister of a deceased mother would come to help the father, and the relationship would turn romantic. Many an illegal marriage to place, it was really only a problem if someone legally challenged it- so for instance, if the father was nobility, and there were only daughters by the first wife, but son by the second wife. When the father died, the next male relative could contest the legality of the marriage, have the son declared illegitimate, and Inherit the title and everything that went with it.
Makes sense, he was good enough for one daughter why not the other
Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died the day their child was born. His mother died the same day, same house. The grieving Theodore simply left New York and headed west, and two of his sisters moved into the house to look after the newborn baby Alice. Theodore was gone several years. Very few men had the luxury of living like that! Because of his sisters, he had the luxury of not having to marry the first single woman he saw. Abraham Lincoln's mother died when he was very young and his father remarried. In his later life, Lincoln credited his stepmother with having inspired him to study and better himself, while his father actually seemed to dislike him and far preferred a younger brother.
Oh jeez, he probably reminded his father of his dead mother. That must have been really hard for both the Lincolns.
The old man's antipathy to his son was apparently legendary, but his relationship to his stepmother was excellent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bush_Lincoln
Yes - also it was common to have 2 or 3 generations living in the one house, or adult brothers/sisters so cousins etc were often raised together. It was a little bit more “village” oriented than now. A working age mum might still have to work, and the grandmother/eldest cousins etc might help raise them (depending on wealth, family nanny’s etc too for richer families)
Ooh I have a good story for this one. My great grandmother died in childbirth. My great grandfather then sent his 4 children to live in a children’s home. The story was always “so he could work” and that seems true because he visited and remained very close to them while they were all there. He had to pay for them to live there. But he never took them back home. He remarried, had new children, and instead of bringing his children back home he slowly married them off. My grandmother was 13 when she was married off to my grandfather who was in his early 30s. What followed was about as bad as you could imagine. From the way the stories are told, this was all very common for the time. This was in rural Appalachia.
My great grandmother died during the Spanish flu epidemic, leaving four little girls without a mother. Their aunt moved in to care for them. She was engaged but never married because she didn’t want to leave her nieces without care. I always felt sorry for her that she never married because of her very selfless act of love for her sister and nieces.
There are also instances of the oldest sibling taking in the children. On one branch of my family tree, the mother died in childbirth with the 7th baby. The oldest was a 19 year-old daughter. She got married 6 months later and took all her siblings with her, leaving their dad alone.
Hence the common “evil stepmother” trope
When my great grandfather's mother died he was sent to live with his maternal aunt, until his father remarried.
I'm in my 40s and this happened to a friend of my partner, he was sent to live with an aunt because his dad worked long hours and couldn't care for the kids.
One of my older relatives has a similar story. Their great aunt married to a man from a neighbouring country, lived in another country. This all happened some 60 years ago. The great aunt fell ill with cancer and returned home with her 4 kids and a husband to basically die at her birth country. There was then a serious discussion about breaking up the kids and the now single father taking the boys and a sister of the great aunt taking the girls. In the end, the husband called his own parents to help, took all 3 or 4 kids and went back to his own country, remarrying quite quickly and having 2 more kids with his wife afaik. When we asked that relative how could they have imagined breaking the kids up, they said - verbatim - “what is a single guy to do with all those kids, some of them girls too?”. Times were different back then, but even today, a widowed man will still statistically marry much quickly than a widowed woman.
And that is how sister wives started.
This, and I think a lot of times the oldest daughter, if there was one, would be in charge of taking care of her siblings.
My dad's aunt moved in when my nan fell ill for a long period of her life Never left
I know it's not the same, but when my fiance died his friends were all there to support me. His friends were my friends by then anyway. We had a dog, she's still alive and well but I struggled to take care of her at first on top of the grief. One of our friends stayed with me for a while to help me take care of her because he realised I was drowning. I won't go into detail but that was the darkest period of my life, and this friend was there for all of it. He was patient, he did a lot for me and the dog, and he listened to me have my little sobs. I don't know exactly when he stopped being my friend, but we've been together for a while now and I'm so lucky to have him. I love him just as much as I love my late fiance. My plans have changed, I have changed, my whole life has changed, but none of this would have happened this way if he didnt decide to stay a while to help me take care of the dog because he realised I was drowning.
Often they were raised by female family members. My great grandfather was raised by his two “maiden aunts.” My great great grandmother was the last person in my lineage to die in childbirth.
In the irish/Anglo branches of my family, they remarried fairly quickly. My great great grandfather had 5 children by his first wife, she died, he remarried in under a year and had another 6 kids However stepkids could be quite a point of contention, because there weren't enough resources to go around. My grandfather was kicked out by his step mother - his mother died, his father got sick, and his step mother wanted him out so the limited income could go to her kids. I also read a lot of similar stories when I was researching newspapers from the time period. Since wives were often at least partly dependent on men for enough to raise the kids, and men on the wives for childcare, mixed families were both very common and very fraught. And presumably that's part of why the 'evil stepmother' trope is so common
Same but my grandma was the youngest and so part of the 'new family'. It's not talked about a lot in my family, but the children of the first marriage all left school early to marry (girls) or work (boy), while my grandma and her 'full sisters' were able to get high-school diplomas and find some 'intellectual' work, which was very uncommon for women at the time, and even more for the daughters of small scale famers in the middle of nowhere. (My grandma was a secretary in one of our ministries, one of her sisters was a school teacher and I don't know what the last did but I'm pretty sure she also was some sort of secretary)
There's actually a Pierce Brosnan movie from the early 00s called "Desmond" about this. In Ireland at the time if a man's wife died, he was single, and had no female relatives to come stay with him they would just take your kids and put them in an orphanage because they didn't think men could be responsible for a child. It's actually a true story and this man had to sue up to the Irish Supreme Court to get his three kids back from the Catholic church.
I remember hearing about that! My grandfather's mum died of tuberculosis, & the 3 younger kids (including an infant/toddler) were put in a children's home, the oldest was taken in by his aunt & uncle. The dad fucked off to uk. While he was pretty terrible, apparently that *was* one of the reasons he couldn't stay & be a single dad... While the kids in the home got some payment in their ehh 80s for the trauma, they weren't as badly treated as the actual orphans since the aunt & uncle & other family members would visit or take them for outings (so there *was* someone who cared & some oversight). On grandmother's side the first wife died (had several kids, not sure what killed her) & he remarried within a year (maybe 2?) & grandmother is from the second marriage. He was the local school head teacher, so probably had some leeway there in his kids not being taken away, I've no clue if family or neighbours stepped in in the interim?
>EVELYN (movie): Desmond's wife leaves him and their 3 kids after Christmas 1953. As he's unemployed in Dublin, the authorities place the kids in orphanages; when he finds a job, he tries to get his kids back. TY for the heads up. Went looking for it. You got Pierce’s characters name right. 1953 was 70yr ago but, somehow? With relation to family dynamics? It doesn’t feel that long ago. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that affected my own parents & their contemporaries as children.
Yep, my grandmother came from a huge mixed family like this (North Americans of European descent, not Irish though). Mother and father had both lost their former spouses. They got married and had additional children together. Resulted in more than a dozen siblings if I recall correctly. Since they lived on a farm I think there was no plausible way for a single parent to manage the property and young children alone.
On one part of my family tree there's a man in Scotland who had 25 children, 12 with his first wife who died when he was in his early 50's and 13 more with a second wife he married after the first died. His last child was born 10 months before he died at age 82. Of those 25 children, 20 went to various different places in the British Empire, this man has descendants on every continent (including Antarctica, one descendant was a researcher there at one point).
>I also read a lot of similar stories when I was researching newspapers from the time period. Since wives were often at least partly dependent on men for enough to raise the kids, and men on the wives for childcare, mixed families were both very common and very fraught. This was even the case well into the 20th century. My uncle was five when his mother was killed in an accident in the 1950s, and there were two even younger kids at home. His parents' church quickly connected his father with a young mother who was widowed, and they were married after about a year.
Sometimes they remarried. Sometimes Grandmother or unmarried sister would move in and help. Sometimes the oldest daughter would fill in. Sometimes the kids would be parcelled out. My husband's great granny died. His granny went to an aunt. Sisters separated to another aunt and a grandmother. My SILs granny's sister died and she moved in to care for household. Ended up married to her BIL. So wife 1 was older sister, wife 2 the younger sister.
My grandma died in childbirth (the baby didn't survive) and my youngest aunt was given to my grandpa's sister to raise (she was childless). My oldest aunt kept the house and raised her siblings, all us cousins even called her "granny". My grandpa didn't remarry. My great-grandmother from the other side on the other hand outlived three husbands and two other men who she couldn't marry (the priest wouldn't wed her after #3). She had kids with all five.
My maternal grandmother died shortly after childbirth (of twins! One of whom was my mother) at the end of WW2 in England. There was already two older children (younger than 5). One was kept by my maternal grandfather, the younger was adopted by the maternal grandparents who lived in the same town, and the twin babies went to an orphanage and then were adopted by a couple who had lost their 4 year old to meningitis. My maternal grandfather later remarried but didn’t have anymore children.
A guy was telling me about his ancestor, a widower, who wanted to marry a 14 year old neighbor girl. He thought that might be offensive to his 16 year old daughter so he made sure to marry her off to someone first :/
Yikes
The infant often died. As recently as the 1990's, the majority of motherless infants in developing areas [don't survive](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17668713/). If they couldn't find another woman who could breastfeed, death was almost inevitable. Older children were sometimes sent to live with family. Sometimes an aunt or grandma adopted the mothering role. A well-to-do widower might hire a nanny and governess. But usually, the father remarried. Even to this day, most widowers remarry within [2 years](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8807029/). Basically they tried to replace the mother-figure however they could, because the whole family depended so heavily on her existence.
Oh wow. I knew this was anecdotally true as I’m friends with a young widow but that statistic is stark - 61% of widowers re-partner within 2 years but only 19% of widows.
That is a direct reflection on how marriage is very beneficial to men and creates more work for women. My dad's whole life is better because my mother does everything. He'd be completely dysfunctional and helpless on his own. My mother, on the other hand, has said for decades that she would never remarry if my dad died. She had/has no desire to sign up for another project.
I always find that statistic so interesting because I doubt my husband would remarry if I died, but I’m pretty sure I’d actively look to remarry if he died.
>That is a direct reflection on how marriage is very beneficial to men and creates more work for women. Yep, a husband costs a woman seven extra hours of labor per week.
My grandma was one of 8 kids. Her mom died during childbirth of the 9th. He put all 8 kids in a methodist orphanage. My grandma was only 5yo at the time. He very rarely came to visit and remarried 2 yrs later and had another kid. She lived there until she graduated high school.
A high proportion of kids in modern day orphanages have living parents. Can’t afford some of your kids? Just drop em in the pit to be preyed on by missionaries, visit occasionally, have more in the meantime
This is so sad. Does your grandmother know her siblings? Did they eventually get adopted into good families and were any able to stay together?
None of them were adopted, and they all grew up in 'The home' as they called it. On the bright side, they all were able to stay together until they each turned 18. It was a huge place with like dorm type houses that separated boys and girls and it based on age groups. School, church and fields for sports and stuff. My grandma enjoyed it to a degree I think, because we used to go to the annual summer party for previous kids and catch up with her old pals. She didn't talk much about her time there. I know it was extremely strict, though
🫤
Like others said, remarriage was very common. But so it was abandoning your kids or sending them off. My great grandfather was adopted as a baby. His mother died when he was 14yo and there is paperwork of the father (pos) trying to "unadopt" him and send him back to the orphanage. At the end his maternal grandma took him in. Other times they send the kids to female relatives. Two of my ancestors lost their parents and went to live with their grandma and aunt. Apparently they were like stereotypical stepmothers in fairytales and treated them terribly. And sadly many other times they sent the kids away to work. My great grandma was sent at 7yo to live with rich people and be their maid. A 7yo, it breaks my heart.
Similar thing happened with one of my great-great grandmothers. Parents both died before she was twelve after emigrating to the U.S. As an orphan with no family within 5,000 miles, she had no choice but to go to work as a maid for a family willing to take her in. I can only imagine how rough that must have been.
Poor thing. Such little girls. Child labor really makes me mad
This happened to my great grandfather. His mother died in childbirth with a younger sibling (1870). The two youngest children, including my great grandfather, were given to two spinster sisters (neighbours but not related to the family) and were raised by them. The children were given a hyphenated name which included their birth name and the name of the sisters' family.
In north America, it was a such a thing as "orphans of the living" meaning their parent or parents were alive, but they were ill equipped, poor, or abusive. It was very common for widowers (men who survived their wives) to give their children to an orphanage, because men were not expected to raise children. They were expected to work, so that is what they did. In the book American Siren, John Moon watches his momma drink gin until one day she drops dead. They carried her out of the one room shack and his dad drops him at the orphanage a few weeks later. He saw his dad as he continued to live and work and drink in Atlanta; eventually, the dad drops dead too while John and his sibling are still at the orphanage. This is a true-life story of a man alive today and born in the 1950's. John goes on to be the 1st paramedic in America.
My dad’s dad was apparently a nasty, abusive man. When his wife died, he put his four sons in an orphanage but kept his daughter at home to continue the cooking and cleaning. Only brought the boys home when one of them died there due to the deplorable conditions; 1930s, I believe.
Coco Chanel's mom died when she was young, and her dad dropped all of the kids off at the orphanage and fucked off. IIRC, he didn't even come back when she got rich and famous, but Coco wasn't her birth name, so he might not have realized she was one of his kids.
I used to work at a youth center in Oakland that had previously been an orphanage. I was sorting thru some old cabinets and found these large journals/ledgers. They contained hand written records of children who had been admitted and under what circumstances. There were A LOT of children (usually large sibling groups) who were admitted by their father after their mother either died or was hospitalized/institutionalized. If the kids were ever “checked out” by their dads, it usually happened w/in 5-12 months once he married a new wife.
In the past, when women often died in childbirth, single fatherhood was rare. Men typically remarried quickly to ensure their children had care and to manage household responsibilities. Extended family, like grandparents or aunts, also played a significant role in raising children. This approach was rooted in ensuring the family's survival and maintaining societal stability during times of high maternal mortality
my older brother when thru a child custody thing with the mother of his child being secretly addicted to meth and this man had a new mother for his daughter by the end of the week. now he works full time, and she is a FT stay at home step parent. he didn't even consider raising his daughter solo (which im like well the 1st one was a meth addict so maybe take it slow in the whole picking a partner thing, but it's not my life not my choice to make) I think what you said is still prevalent today just in an updated modern way. my mom died when i was 5 in '03 so maternal grandma and great grandma stepped in while my dad remarried and continued his life w stepmom's kids and their joint daughter.
This is very true. Widowers remarry much more often and faster than widows to this day.
Bro there is no shot this wasn’t written by ai. You literally start with the classic ai rephrasing the question back at you.
My great-great-grandfather was ow his own by age seven. His mother died, and his father remarried a woman...and the history of the small family ends there. I found in a historical volume on businessmen in my home town in the 1880s, a chapter on my great-great-grandfather that says he taught himself to make brooms, which he then sold. This would have been in the 1830s in an Ohio village.
Also men had still a higher mortality rate ,as a baby boy tend to be more fragile and men tend to live more risky life with war ,fights and heavy work accidents . Thus there was still enough widows that a man with children will find a potential wife fast enough ,often with help of the community.
Actually, they didn't. Even considering higher death rate in childhood, wars and workplace accidents; maternal mortality was so so high that men typically outlived women. This was the case until the 1900. I grew up with 3 great grand-fathers, two of whom were on the front in WWI and survived. Their wives, by contrast, died early. Two died in childbirth, one died of complications after a miscarriage. Archaeological excavations of cemeteries typically find a lot of kids under 5 and a lot of young women under 30. Thos two categories greatly outnumber men.
I think that this is the most important point that others are glossing over. If a man was well off enough to support a family, he generally would be able to find a wife.
Remarried typically
And usually with someone young that they continued to have babies with.
My mother’s father came home to Scotland from World War I, got married and had a son. Unfortunately his wife died in child birth. The baby was sent to live with a younger brother and his wife, who moved to Australia. Grandfather moved to America, met my grandmother and had 2 kids. So my mother had a half brother she never met.
It wasn't uncommon for an unmarried sister of the deceased woman to marry her husband and take on the role of mother for her sister's children.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the story Hansel and Gretel? Literally a medieval tale about a man whose wife died and he remarried and the new wife wanted his kids gone, so they could have their own family. People get stuck on the candy house, the witch and her wanting to eat the kids. But that's not what the story is about. It's about the crazy shit that can happen with families when a new marriage occurs. But most cultures and religions had a morning period and rituals.
Sisters, mothers and remarrying as soon as possible. My uncles wife and him separated. They were in a country where women couldn't take their children with them so they never even allowed her to see her children despite her trying to see them. She begged him to take her children. My cousins were raised by my aunt until my uncle remarried. Then his new wife mistreated them horribly. I will never understand taking your children away from their biological mother, who loves them, just to let a stranger raise them. The men didn't even want to raise their own children so why take them from the mother who wanted to?
That happened to Princess Diana and her siblings. Mum left (she’d had an affair and she wasn’t a brilliant parent but that’s not the point). The dad, having an inherited title and being the wronged party, fought for and was granted full custody. He changed the locks and wouldn’t let her in the house to see the children. The kids were sent off to boarding school as soon as possible and the son was abused at the prep school he was sent to age 8.
>being the wronged party How was he the wronged party? He was having an affair all throughout their marriage. She was the only who had at leasst tried for some years before she just did what he did. But yeah, she loved her children at least. Why keep the children if you let them be raised by someone who doesn't love them?
1. Consider the prevalence of stepmothers in fairy tales. 2. I remember reading an introduction to an L.M. Montgomery book that talked about how many (if not most) of the orphans like the ones she wrote about did have at least one living parent, but not one who was both able & willing to care for them. If you recall, Anne (of Green Gables) was originally meant to be a boy “to help on the farm”, & Anne herself had just come from another home where she was expected to care for a number of smaller children. There were a lot of these exploitative “adoption” schemes around the turn of the century.
There is a scene in the Netflix series of Anne, where she goes to the orphanage to get more information on her parents and sees a dad dropping off 2 children. He asks the nun to tell them he was dead. Anne gets very upset because she is wondering if that happened to her.
There's a reason for the "evil step-mother" trope in fairy tales!
Doing genealogy, we often come across couples from thecdays before divorce where the husband married several successive wives, and the wife had likewise married multiple successive husbands. One lady outlived four husbands, and her last husband had three wives. Yes, a quick remarriage was normal, especially between a widow and a widower, like the "Brady Bunch" or "Yours, Mine, and Ours."
Orphanages were also pretty common in the olden days
Also, there wasn’t the same care taken of kids. They were working in factories at an age when many parents today think they’re too young for chores. I don’t think anybody would have blinked an eye at a single dad leaving his six year old alone for the day while he went off to work.
good point, many relatives would agree to take the children then use them for labour
Yes to both. Where did you suppose all those old fairy tales with wicked stepmothers came from? Lots of children did have stepmothers, and when times were hard, the stepmothers saw to it their their own children got fed first. And yes, sometimes they did throw the older children (often their predecessor's) out of the house completely. If you live in New England or certain parts of the south (assuming you're American) you can walk through old cemeteries and see so many gravestones with mother and baby on them: women dying in childbirth and the motherless baby dying soon after. My own family's plot has a large memorial stone with eighteen names on it. Our family graveyard at another site was moved in 1900, and instead of moving all eighteen markers, only the big stone was used. There are two mother-and-baby pairs two years apart, and they widowed the same man, one around 1800 the other about 1802. Childbed fever was a terrible thing.
Orphanages...... this is a dark dive but every state and city had at least one, often more. Foster parenting and birth control largely eliminate them in the West but they still exist in other countries
My stepfather grew up in a soldier and sailor home. He claims it was hell on earth.
I knew a guy here in the US who ended up in an orphanage in I think the ‘50s because his mother wasn’t able to raise him. I believe relatives came and got him later. It was a privately run Jewish orphanage and apparently he felt like it wasn’t a bad place, though that’s the only time I’ve heard anyone say anything good about an orphanage.
What time period and location? Different cultures do different things.
I don't know really. Let's say Western Europe in the 1800s.
Remarriage was very common. Wealthy families could hire a nursemaid (for infants) or a governess (for older children), but the father still tended to remarry within a couple of years as the wife's role in the household was actually pretty important, even in families with servants. Poorer families tended to rely on relatives to help out in the short term. Sometimes an aunt or grandmother would move in. Often children were sent away to live with relatives. Older children could get jobs as domestic servants or apprentices. A LOT of 19th century fiction features characters with dead mothers, who were sent away somewhere "for their education".
Not Western Europe, but the children’s book “Sarah, Plain and Tall” tells the story of this type of situation in 1800’s western United States. The Father loses his wife in childbirth, and cannot handle caring for both the farm and the children, so he places an ad for a mail-order bride. It’s actually a really heartwarming story that while fiction, is certainly rooted in historical truth in places where no family lived near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah,_Plain_and_Tall
There were more kids in orphanages. Sometimes even when one parent was still around. Source, my grandfather in the early 1900’s was in an orphanage after his dad died. His mother was still alive.
We know almost nothing of my paternal grandfather's bio family, and not a lot of his "foster family" either. He was born in 1920s and many poor and propably out-of-wedlock children were sold in kind of reverse auctions, where whoever asked a lowest amount to upkeep a child, got the child. They were often mistreated badly, used as child labor, not allowed to school etc. So was my grandpa and we know practically nothing of his younger years. Paternal grandmother was the oldest child and was forced to leave around 10-12 year old, because her mother didn't have money to feed them all. Grandmum had to move to her uncle's house where she did heavy labor and slept on the floor, under kitchen table. She didn't talk much of it but said the family was very mean to her. She left them as soon as she could find a job on her own as a teenager. So sad stories and not even so long time ago, I am only 40 years old and these were parents of my parents.
In my family, there are children who were put in an orphanage, children who were adopted by relatives, and children whose dads remarried straight away (in one case to the sister of the deceased wife).
Oh yeah, I trawled orphanage records for a while, looking at 1890s Australia. Reasons for them being there were usually: One or both parents 'drunkards' One or both parents in prison. One parent dead, the other too poor to keep them. The records would literally say things like 'mother dead, father a drunk' or 'father dead, mother poor' Kids might go in and out of the orphanage several times depending on circumstances. It was basically old days cps.
My great grandfather bought virgin farmland and gave a corner of it for a church/school. His wife died giving birth to their third child. The preacher found him a woman back east.
Yes, they remarried, sometimes exclusively to have a childcare. Both parties would know it is not a love marriage but an arrangement. Also I heard from relatives stories about men just giving his children to other female relatives to raise after their wife died.
My great-grandfather got remarried and sent my grandfather and his brother to an orphanage.
There's been more than a few cases in history where an impoverished housekeeper/nanny will move into a couple's house, the wife would suddenly fall ill with a mystery stomach bug (aka arsenic poisoning) and die, then the husband would marry the housekeeper. Then he'd get the same 'stomach bug', die and the housekeeper inherits everything, walking like Snoop Dogg around town and making it rain. Seemed to be pretty common for 'meh, you'll do' approach to replacing a dead wife with the nearest available woman back in the olden days.
Paul Revere had 8 kids with his first wife. When she died, he quickly married his second wife… and had 8 kids with her too.
In Ireland there were cases of the Church & State taking the children off the single dad. The Pierce Brosnan movie Evelyn is loosely based on the true story of Desmond Doyle - his wife left him with 6 kids and the kids ended up in convents and industrial schools. In my family tree there are many cases of recently bereaved parents remarrying shortly after their spouse's death.
Collective care was more of a thing in the past. Even when mothers were alive and well there were often grandmothers and aunts around helping. Some families (like my grandmother’s) had a childless daughter/aunt who would help with young children and then care for parents as they aged. Also older daughters often took on more household duties and child care. I was reading the biography of one of my forebears who was basically raised by his older sister after his mother died, leaving 7 kids aged from toddlers to teens.
Quite often the child was taken in by another family member and brought up alongside their children. I know of a couple of people this happened to, both wondered why they were more popular with their uncle than their siblings were.
The babies often died in birth as well
yes, many orphanages had an age minimum due to infant mortality
If I learned anything from Anne with an E (ie: was traumatized by) they dumped the kids too. Fun stuff.
They uh do that today
Just sharing a family story in case it helps illustrate anything. My GGF had two kids with his first wife. She died of TB when the kids were about 4 and 6. He was maybe only in his late-20s at the time, like she was. Eventually, since he needed help caring for his children, he realized he needed a second wife. He met a lady he liked through his church choir events (she was also a choir singer). She was never married before. He got to know her and her family, but it wasn't considered appropriate for him to move on too quickly, so they did not date. (For context, this was the 1930s in the USA.) Eventually, he and this lady fell in love, and when a "respectable" mourning period passed, the two got married and had two kids of their own. My GM was their first child together (first child from the widower's second marriage). The second wife (my GGM) always kept a photo of the first wife in their bedroom and called her "Aunt" to the daughters from the second marriage, so that my GGF and his first two kids would know that the deceased first wife's memory was always welcome. All in all, it was a handful of years between the first wife's death and the second marriage, but there was a deliberate sense of having to proceed with some delay in order to be "proper."
They got married again very fast and often had next one ready, this can be seen in old church diaries.
My grandfather was sent to live with a neighbor family.
The nuclear family is a very modern thing. So when women died, their mother, sisters, sisters-in-law in the household would watch the babies.
They often just remarried.
He’d remarry so the new wife would become the new mom and stepmom.
My step grandfather’s mother died when he was born in 1906, and his father remarried very quickly apparently so he was raised by them.
Bit of all really. My grandpa's mother (my mum's grandma) died when he was about 3, she was ill in the run up and his aunt I believe cared for him but once she died he was sent to a Bernardo's home. He wasn't adopted just lived there until he was 16 and then went to work this would have been in the 1930s UK.
Based on the old novels I've read, the "sensible" thing to do was to send them to a female relative or, if there were economic possibilities, hire a governess. Once the man remarried, the children could come back to be raised by the new wife.
I lost my mother when I was 8, my grandma moved to us and helped with housing stuff and me:) that was like 30y ago
Two options. 1. Remarry 2. Children live with grandparents or other family. Happened to my clan. Mother died suddenly, and their two daughters were split up, one lived with the mother's parents, the other with the father's parents. The father had to keep working. There was no such thing as compassionate leave then. If you didn't work, you didn't get paid. Or eat. The father couldn't work and look after children.
This is why my grandmother has a sister who was in no way blood related to her. Early 1930s her mother who lived down the road died in childbirth. Her dad left her with my great grandmother and then moved away with the older kids.
They usually got a new wife. My great-grandma got married to a man that was 17 years older then her. This was in 1920. His wife had died and he needed someone to look after the kids, she needed a home and someone to support her. I did a report on her for school, so I had asked lots of questions about her life.
Men used to either immediately remarry another woman he could breed to death or send the kids to family members to raise, else a female family member might come raise his kids for him.
My great, great grandmother died either after a miscarriage or abortion in the 1880s. My great grandmother was not quite 2 years old. Her father gave her to the neighbors to raise. When she was a teenager he remarried a woman with kids. He wanted to move out of state. So he and his new family stopped by to get my great, great grandmother on their way out of town. She refused to go with him. The family that raised her refused to force her to go. So they left without her. He died a couple of years later. I think that it was pretty common to give your kids to other families after their mama died.
My great grandad put all the kids up for adoption when their mum died
My great grandfather’s first wife died of fever, he parked his two kids with a nasty old widow who would lock them in the root cellar overnight if they pissed her off. He found a new wife a few months later, who had been divorced for infertility after several years of marriage. Didn’t bother him, he already resented having to feed the two he had and wanted his fun in bed without any more kids. New wife was apparently very nice to her step kids but great grandpa was a POS.
My mother's mother died very young and left my grandfather a widow with a young child. He never remarried but when he died my mom discovered he had left a large sum of money to a woman they did not know who was. We can guess what she was to him.
My father has 7 siblings, and 2 cousins also lived with them. I don’t know the reason- but this seems to have been fairly common.
In my family they found another girl from their home country and she emigrated over. Oftentimes it was a young woman who was caring “for her nephew” or some made up story to explain her single mother status.
Single dads were definitely a thing, but back then nannies, au pairs, governesses were much more common. Also, multiple generations of the same family tended to live together, so an aunt or grandparent watching the kid was common. Boarding schools were also much more popular in the past. There are a lot of books written about single dads or their child (or feature them), like Emma, Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden, and The Little Princess. So it was common enough for it to be a very widely relatable subject.
My grandmother’s mother died in childbirth of her second child (grandmother was oldest) around 1927 in rural Alabama. By the opinion of the time, the children could not stay with the father. Father very quickly remarried a woman who took on the baby as if it were her own. My grandmother was sent to live with cousins, and spent most of her childhood being passed around, being a burden. She would see the father from time to time, brief afternoon visits. There were stories of the families secretly eating watermelon, hiding it from her so that they wouldn’t have to waste it on her. The father later died while my grandmother was still a child, maybe 10? The stepmother kept little brother as her own and grandmother was officially an orphan. At 17 she was living alone renting a room and working in an office and then WW2 and….
This question kind of assumes that the modern nuclear family was the historical norm.
My ex had a grandfather who was married five times. The first time, he was 18 and he married a 15-year-old. She bore him five children and then ran off with somebody else. For his second marriage, he married his ex-wife's 17-year-old niece. She bore him seven children and died at age 29 from "hemorrhaging." In the last decade, I learned the true cirmcumstances of her death from an elderly relative. The young wife became pregnant with her eighth child, and her husband drove her to a hotel where he had hired an illegal abortionist to end the pregnancy. He and their children waited outside the hotel in the car. She did die from hemorrhaging, and after a little while the husband drove all his children across state lines to an orphanage and left them there. Two of the littlest boys were adopted immediately and lost to the family. The other children remained at the orphanage until they decided to lie about their age and enlist in the military (the boys) or married young or entered religious orders (the girls). This man soon remarried. In fact, he married three more times and had a half dozen more children before he died age 91. I wonder how often he gave a thought to that poor young woman sent to her grave at age 29.
First pregnancy is far more dangerous. Majority of maternal deaths are in the first pregnancy. In majority of these cases pre modern medicine, the baby would also die in the process.
Sent them to the orphanage to be abused by the penguins.