The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.
The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.
Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.
Advance praise for Before and After
“In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. With a journalist’s keen eye and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book.”—Pam Jenoff,author of The Orphan’s Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris
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Summary
"This is a story that doesn't have an ending. It never will."
The enormity of scandal generated by Georgia Tann's unscrupulous adoption practices in Memphis, Tennessee for nearly thirty years, left fragments of abandonment deeply rooted within the psyche of thousands of innocent children. Thousands. Could beauty possibly rise from among the ashes? This moving collection of personal recollections from those children, their children, their grandchildren, proves once again that truth can be stranger, and even more unbelievable, than fiction.
What began as an international bestseller by author Lisa Wingate, "Before We Were Yours" has become an impetus for reunions among dozens of family members; who once were declared "survivors" and have now become, as journalist and author Judy Christie so beautifully states, "these people are heroes".
"The realities of what happened at the Tennessee Children's Home Society are hard to contemplate, but they are necessary to revisit. The history we deny is the history we are most likely to repeat. "
I received a copy of this book from the author and publisher. The opinions stated are entirely my own.