Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate

 

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication date: October 22, 2019

Pages: 320

This is a review of an ebook from Netgalley

In this very moving and impressive book, the reader gets to know more about the orphans who survived the corrupt Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis, which was run from the 1920's to the 1950's by a woman named Georgia Tann. During this period, more than 5000 babies where stolen from poor families in the shantytowns  of Memphis, or kidnapped from the street in Georgia Tann' s Black limousine .Sometimes the families where told in the hospital (once a whole group of mothers during the same night in a the maternity ward in a hospital in Memphis) that the baby had died, while their where brough the children's center of Georgia Tann, and where the baby's where sold for huge sums of money to wealthy parents, who got false and incorrect papers from the center, in which stories of the birth parents where told that where not true. In every case , Georgia Tann made huge financial profits from her criminal actions.

Many of the adoptees got in touch with Lisa Wingate after her first book, Before We Where Yours, and told her their story, which led to a conference organised by Judy Christie, a weekend conference for the people who were still looking for their natural birth parents and siblings. The conference was being hold in Memphis, the city where the former Tennessee Children's Home Society, was located. At the time of the conference, the adoptees were in their 70's and 80's, but for many it was the family, some two and three generations later, that were looking for answers.

In this book the authors portray individual stories of the adoptees, and how they landed in the Tennessee Children's society, and what happened to them after the where adopted. It is very moving, sometimes heartbreaking to read how Georgia Tann made profit of the life of poor parents and their babies, how could this go on for so long?? It gives you the cold chills as a reader. The authors write it in a way though that it isn't a heavy tearjerker, they did a great job at keeping you interested as a reader and I just couldn't put this impressive book away. If you want to read a beautifully written and real story, this is the book for you.