It is a sad fact that every age has its unwanted children and its own way of dealing with them. While the number of children who were in some way unwanted would have varied between time and place, many of our ancestors’ lives would have been touched by this issue. This may not be a pleasant question to ask, but what might our ancestors have done if they found themselves with children they could not support, or what if they themselves had been given up – willingly or otherwise – by their parents?

Before reliable contraceptives, abandonment was the most usual method of limiting family size or avoiding the shame of illegitimacy. We might understand ‘abandonment’ as putting the child in harm’s way by leaving it somewhere it may or may not be found, but this context might also cover fostering, informal adoption or even the selling of newborns. It was a widespread practice during the Roman Empire and early medieval periods. In classical Roman law, the practice was called expositio (literally ‘putting out’) and was a legal prerogative of the paterfamilias (male head of family) – a father had the right of life and death over his children.

The Christian church became involved in the rescue of abandoned infants by the 5th century, if not sooner. Ecclesiastical rulings show an early opposition to infant exposure, and churches became a new place where foundlings (as such children were termed) could be left, and one with a better chance of them being discovered. Such children could have been brought up as oblates, dedicated to religious service, and could be seen as something of a donation to the church, getting neatly around any moral obstacle to abandoning your child.

Foundling hospitals
By the 15th century, a rise in the number of abandoned children and greater concern for their welfare led to new solutions appearing: foundling hospitals (‘hospital’ in this sense being a charitable rather than a medical institution). The first were opened in large Italian cities, and by the middle of the century, the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome offered a ‘baby box’ for parents to leave their child safely and anonymously, a device whose equivalent can still be found in many countries today. Modern baby boxes are heated and equipped with alarms to alert staff of a new arrival, allowing a safe, secure abandonment; they are found mostly in Germany and Eastern Europe, with one in Hamburg receiving 42 babies between 2002 and 2012, 14 of whom were returned to mothers who later changed their minds.

The idea of foundling hospitals slowly spread around Europe – they were established in major cities such Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid and Dublin before the idea finally arrived in Britain in the 18th century. Apathy and Puritan morality about illegitimacy – the most common reason for abandonment – meant that the only establishment in London then dealing with unwanted and orphaned children was Christ’s Hospital, founded in 1552, but this too prohibited illegitimate children from 1676.

London at this time was a large, rowdy city with a rapidly expanding population (it doubled in size to nearly one million during the 18th century) and sites of desperate poverty. Welfare was limited to the meagre provisions of the Poor Law system of parish relief and, from 1722, the workhouses. The workhouses could accept foundlings, but they frequently died from neglect; while the general population death rate for under-fives in the 1720s was 75%, in workhouses it increased to over 90%. It has been estimated that around a thousand babies a year were abandoned in London at this time. With few options available, many were left in the street or even on rubbish heaps. A practical solution was clearly needed.

After 17 years of campaigning, Thomas Coram (see above) managed to set up a foundling hospital, which admitted its first children in March 1741. It accepted children until it closed in 1954 (superseded by the children’s charity Coram), with 27,000 foundlings having passed through it in that time. As great a number as this is, it was far from the biggest concern of its type; between 1764 and 1913, the Moscow foundling hospital took in over a million children, while in 1909 alone another in Vienna was caring for around 30,000.

Many of the London foundlings were left with a token such as a fragment of cloth or trinket, a small piece of the mother’s life left with her baby and a means to identify it should she ever return. Most didn’t. For some babies, there wasn’t even this – a boy admitted in 1757, for example, is recorded to have been clothed with rags swarming with varmen when he arrived. Life for the children was a disciplined and strictly Christian environment that emphasised duty. The children were educated and taught to have modest expectations, leaving to take up work (often in domestic service, agriculture or the military) at age 10 or 11 in the 18th century, rising to 15 by the 20th century.

At the mid-19th century, historians estimate that around 120,000 infants were being abandoned annually across Europe. In the 1860s, thousands were begging and sleeping on the streets of London alone. In 1867, Thomas Barnardo set up a ‘ragged school’ to provide a basic education for some of these children, followed by a home for destitute boys in Stepney Causeway in 1870 and one for girls in Barkingside in 1873. As with the foundling hospital, the Barnardo homes sought to train children to make a living after they were old enough to leave. By the time Barnardo died in 1905, the charity he founded had opened 96 homes caring for more than 8,500 children.

The stigma of illegitimacy remained a major barrier to providing such children with the help they needed. The 1834 Poor Law Reform Act made these children the sole responsibility of the mother until aged 16, with little alternative but the workhouse if she could not support her child. One study looking at children born out of wedlock in Manchester between 1891 and 1894 found that almost 40% died before their first birthday. This made such infants two and a half times more likely to die than the average child.

Some desperate women turned to foster mothers; while many were reputable, those at the bottom end of the market were commonly termed ‘baby farmers’. There was nothing new about the practice, but the draconian poor laws meant more unmarried mothers turning to women of unknown or disreputable backgrounds. Many children in this situation died of neglect or starvation, and a handful of baby farmers seem to even have expedited the process. A notorious case was that of Amelia Dyer, who was found guilty of killing six babies in her care and depositing their bodies in the Thames; she was hanged in June 1896.

Legal adoption
From the following year, the Infant Life Protection Act required registration of professional baby minders and that the authorities be informed of all adoptions where the fee was less than £20, on the grounds that children in poorer circumstances were most at risk. It also, conveniently, protected the anonymity of the better-off mothers who could pay more for their illegitimate children to be fostered. It was not until the establishment of the National Adoption Register in 1927 that all adoptions had to be legally recorded in England and Wales, with Scotland (1930) and Northern Ireland (1931) setting up similar systems soon afterwards.

With the appearance of more widely available contraception during the 20th century, and the legalisation of abortion (1967 in Britain), new approaches to the age-old issue of unwanted children emerged. The increase in public welfare provision for poor and unmarried mothers, and state-provided foster care, also contributed to the decline in institutions for foundlings. Formal legal adoptions became possible, with statistics showing that 92,727 children were adopted throughout the UK in 2013, with around 62,000 more being placed in foster care.

In In the Print Edition
Read articles about the Poor Law and child miners in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available online at discoveryourancestors.co.uk