The Tennessee Children's Home Society

One of the newspaper ads run by Tann

    In plot T-504 at Elmwood lies one of the most heartbreaking stories to be found in the cemetery. The lot book at Elmwood says that this plot is “Reserved for the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.   For those of you not familiar with the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, this was the agency run by Memphis’s infamous Georgia Tann, also known as the “Baby Thief”. Tann practiced illegal adoptions and kidnapped children by several nefarious means. She was in contact with several local doctors who would let her know when unwed mothers were having children. Tann would go to the mothers and take the children, saying that they were sick and she was going to provide them with medical care. Instead, she adopted the babies out and told the mothers that they had died, and she had kindly taken care of the burial. She also had an arrangement with state mental hospitals and would take the children of patients there without their consent, then falsify their documents to reflect whatever background potential adoptive parents would like. Children were often adopted out to parents out of state (Joan Crawford’s twin daughters were adopted through this society), making it easier for her to take as much as she could from the adoption fees. Adoptive parents were not screened or examined, and no house visits or anything of the sort were made. If the interested parties had the money, the child was theirs. Not only was Tann stealing children and lying about their backgrounds, the children also often died under her care from neglect and poor medical treatment.

    In 1941, the society lost its place as a member of the Child Welfare League of America due to the fact that Tann destroyed most of the records in association with the adoptions. Finally, in 1950, a state investigation into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society began. Tann’s illegal dealings, falsifying of documents, and poor treatment of children came out, and the society was shut down. Tann was never prosecuted though, as she died in 1950 of cancer.   

    In this unmarked plot are buried 19 children who were victims of Georgia Tann. The first burial of this plot was on September 17th, 1923 and the last was on October 10, 1949, shortly before the organization was shut down. Some of the children in the lot book have full names listed, but Tann was known to change the names of the children to make them harder to track, so there’s no way of knowing if those are their real names. Ten of the names listed are only first names, such as Baby Billie or Baby Estelle, etc. These poor unknown children are just a few of the many casualties of this horrible organization. It’s estimated that over 500 children died in Georgia Tann’s care, many of whose graves were never found.

Works Cited

"Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records." Find A Grave. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.findagrave.com/index.html>.

"Homepage." Elmwood Cemetery. Elmwood Cemetery, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://www.elmwoodcemetery.org/>. 

 "Tennessee Children's Home Society." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2013.     
            Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org      
            /wiki/Tennessee_Children's_Home_Society>.