...Also, a lot of kids were taken in by different families for different reasons without benefit of what we'd call adoption in these days. They just did it for whatever reason and raised 'em. My mother had a cousin raised with her family when something happened to the cousin's parents.
^^^ This was fairly common back in the day. especially female children when the mother died or for whatever reason no longer actively present in the home.
Back in the late '60s a very nice, well kempt older woman doing church visitations stopped at our house. As we talked it turned out that she was a distant cousin on my dad's side of the family. She said she was just a toddler when her mother died, had several both male and female siblings all older than her and after their mother passed other two parent families took in the girls and very youngest boys and raised them as their own. Over the passing years they wound up scattered all over the country. She said it took years to eventually locate them all again.
