Tag Archives: Crittenton

How the controversial history of adoption is scrubbed from the ‘record’

A 1974 article from the Detroit Free Press on the closing of my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, fails to mention the thousands of adoptees who were born and relinquished here in the decades after World War II.

I have published an article that examines a widespread practice of hiding the history of the U.S. adoption system and how it operated nationally in every state in the decades after World War II. Those who promoted adoption include millions of family members, religious organizations like the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, social service groups that served single mothers, mainstream religious leaders and churches, doctors, some medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, hospitals that delivered the infants, and the profession of social work, whose practitioners managed and promoted the adoption system for decades. 

Yet the roles of adoption institutions are whitewashed and omitted in most accounts that most of the public will read from these groups’ publications and on online sources. My research that I highlight in greater detail in my book indicates this pattern of historical inaccuracy is intentional, in order to hide their complicity in promoting a system that separated families. For most of those impacted, this has been and remains a lifetime separation because of discriminatory laws sealing adoption records.

How the history of adoption in Michigan remains hidden

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken shortly after its opening in 1929 (source: Fifty Years’ Work with Girls, 1883-1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes).

I have published an updated article examining the hidden history of my birthplace, Detroit’s Crittenton General hospital. In my article, I write that one of the unexpected outcomes of the American adoption experience is how the stigma of illegitimacy created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in the general population. The failure to count adoptees officially in state and federal vital statistics such as the U.S. Census up until the year 2000 also has promoted their hidden status. The intersection of these outcomes can be seen in the story of Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, demolished in 1975 and now largely forgotten.

I was among what I estimate to be at least 20,000 infants born and placed for adoption at this major facility promoting that system during the height of the boom adoption years after World War II. My memoir on my life’s story, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, provides additional information on the history of the facility—one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals dedicated to promoting the separation of infants from their birth mothers and kin through adoption. My book also examines how birth records of adoptions at the hospital are either kept hidden or intentionally sealed to prevent the public from knowing true scope of the adoption system in Detroit and Michigan in the decades after World War II.

Finding that rare picture, taken at my birthplace

photo of six nurses and six infants, Crittenton General Hospital

A photo taken at Crittenton General Hospital in 1965 shows young infants in the care of nurses (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection). Most infants born here were placed for adoption.

This week I read a wonderful photo history book on the hospitals, orphanages, and mental health facilities that were built and operated in Detroit and the surrounding area from the 1800s through the late 1900s. The slim tome, called Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers, by Patricia Ibbotson, is a great piece of storytelling. It shows how our society, in one major metropolitan area, cared for the sick, the infirmed, and the needy.

Ibbotson notes, “All of the hospitals, as well as homes for the aged and orphans, evolved from the poorhouse system.” She also notes most were founded by religious orders. Orphanages stand out for me because I am by historic reckoning a child placed in institutional care: in my case, I was given up for adoption and put into foster care for more than five weeks, making me a bastard, orphan, and foster kid all at once.

Patricia Ibbotson’s 2004 photo history book, Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers.

Ibbotson’s book documents nearly a half-dozen orphan facilities, describing the “illegitimately born” and discarded infants as “foundlings,” and their shamed mothers as women who had “fallen by the way.” In the United States, society viewed both groups as outsiders and, like most of Europe, treated them poorly, if not lethally well into the 20th century.

According to Ibbotson’s research, Detroit had more than a half-dozen orphanages for homes for “unfortunate ones”— meaning the discarded infants—before 1900. Detroit’s long history of dealing with foundlings or so-called illegitimate babies resembled approaches used in other major cities, like New York City and its New York Foundling Hospital. The treatment or maltreatment of these infants left at these facilities in big cities helped spur the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and reforms to address well-documented abuses of discarded infants in the early 1900s. That organization played a key reformer role making adoption a safer system in the United States, which personally impacted my life after I was born.

Detroit, a city of fallen women and foundlings

A shot from 1912 of the Detroit Woman’s Hospital and Foundlings Home shows some of the many illegitimately born babies in its care (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Wayne State University collection).

Like New York City, Detroit was home to a large hospital dedicated to women and their “foundling” kids called the Detroit Woman’s and Foundling Home, which opened in 1869, created by a religious order to care for these socially scorned outcasts. It later became Hutzel Women’s Hospital.

Detroit also had multiple Florence Crittenton maternity homes and hospitals, which first opened in 1897 and later in grander fashion with opening of the Crittenton General Hospital in 1929, north of downtown. There were five homes and hospital/homes in all. Crittenton General Hospital, with three wings and dormitory facilities that also housed single pregnant mothers, became a future epicenter of adoption promotion in Michigan in the boom adoption years after World War II.

My life story began there, and that story was hidden from me for decades until I untangled the mystery, found my birth records, and put together the pieces of a tale showing how infants like me were part of a national system that separated millions of families in every state and territory. I recount this complex, national story in my newly released memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are (purchase here).

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit is shown in a photo, taken shortly after its opening in 1929. I was born and relinquished into adoption here.

I requested Ibbotson’s book through my local library, hoping to find an image of the maternity hospital where I was born and then given up for adoption. That facility, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, was one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals—it had 115 dormitory beds and two wings devoted to maternity care, according to Crittenton records. The Florence Crittenton Association of American and National Florence Crittenton Mission, which ran it and dozens of similar homes and hospitals for single pregnant women, promoted adoption in the three decades after World War II. I describe the significance of the hospital in my memoir and study of the American adoption system and experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

A picture and its meaning

The picture included in Ibbotson’s book of Crittenton General Hospital could not have been more meaningful. It is a shot reportedly taken in 1965, the year of my birth, in front of the hospital. It shows six nurses in white outfits, each holding very young infants, all presumably being future adoptees. The cut line described the facility as a place for “’unfortunate women and girls’ and their babies.”

That same shot shown above, taken of Crittenton General Hospital in 1965, shows likely future adoptees in the care of nurses, though not every child born here was relinquished. Note, the cut line information has some inaccuracies from the source (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection).

On my computer, I zoomed in on the faces, wondering if I am in the half-dozen infants in the shot. I would have big ears, and I did not see that in two of the faces that are visible. The chances are perhaps one in several hundred I could have been captured in this unknown still, that is with the historical collection at the Detroit Public Library.

Unfortunately the picture and Ibbotson failed, like nearly every official source I have consulted, to even mention the word adoption, despite the hospital’s central role in that institution for the entire state and region.

My efforts to find the number of relinquished babies all failed, which I describe in my book in more detail. However, I peg the number of relinquished number of infants from Crittenton General at well over 20,000, mostly in the decades after the war, til the time of the hospital’s closing in 1974. It was torn down in 1975.

Based on all records I’ve found and my own original birth certificate, the cut line for this picture listed the wrong address for the photo as East Elizabeth Street, which is the address for the former Florence Crittenton Hospital, near downtown Detroit. Crittenton General Hospital was located at 1554 Tuxedo Street. Also the date of the hospital’s closure, according to the Detroit Free Press and other sources I consulted for my book, is 1974. The cut line lists 1976.


For additional information on the history of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, I can recommend a couple of sources: 

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933.