Famous Adoptees & Fosterees, Page 2

Who is Included and Excluded?

This list includes people who were adopted or fostered, for whatever reason, and also people who as children were separated from their birth parents for significant periods of time.

Thus it includes the following particular classes of individual:

Children who were formally adopted by their step-parents (and so who in fact may have always lived with at least one birth parent),
Children who were brought up by relatives other than their parents, even if their parents were living,
Children who were raised by family friends, even if never adopted,
Children who were adopted by "strangers," that is, by people not in their families, nor by friends of their parents - the usual type of adoption in Western countries today,
Children who were stolen or abducted and raised by their captors, including slaves and war captives,
Children and adults who were formally adopted, but still lived with their birth families, which was more common in ancient times,
People who were adopted as a mark of honor by members of another tribe or culture,
Foster children,
Children who were raised in orphanages, hospitals, borstals, prisons, etc.,
Children who lived alone or on the streets, with no adult to care for them,
Children from cultural minorities who were taken from their parents by government policy and sent to children's homes or boarding schools, or fostered or adopted by families from the dominant culture, as a form of forcible assimilation,
Children who were sent by their parents to be raised by other families, as part of the normal aristocratic child-rearing practices of their time and place, generally to do with keeping tribal or family alliances strong, like dynastic marriages,
People from religious traditions,
Legendary and mythological characters, and
Feral children: children raised by animals.

The list also includes some entries which could be considered as simply excursions into the sometimes bizarre byways of the history of adoption and related practices: religious groups who practiced special forms of adoption, notorious cases of forcible adoption, mass kidnappings, honorific adoption and the like, where the individuals involved might not themselves otherwise have been included.

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No living person has been included whose adoptive or fostered history is not a matter of public record, unless I have been given written permission to include him/her; almost all sources used are publicly available. There are people I would like to include whose adoptions are not public knowledge and who have refused their permission, and there are people whose adoptions were not public knowledge when I began to compile this list whose names were known to me but not included until they "went public." There are a few cases where I have included people whose adoption or other care history is tentative (and where that controversy is a matter of public record), and these entries clearly state that this is so.

It excludes:

Children who were sent voluntarily to boarding school by their parents,
Step-children who were never formally adopted by their step-parent,
Fictional characters and characters from cartoon and the movies, and
The adopted children of famous parents, unless they were also famous or influential in their own right.

I have included some people who may or may not have been adopted or fostered as we understand the terms, or even at all. For some individuals, especially but not always in former centuries, there are several versions of their lives, and one may state that the person was adopted and another may say not so. I have tended to err on the side of including them, although I try to mention both versions. Also, the terms "adoptee" and "foster child" have not always been used in the senses we mean them today. In a number of instances I have strong suspicions that my sources mean no more than "protégé" or "nominated heir and successor," and indeed, in former times that was what adoption essentially meant in many cases. This is especially true in cases where people, often adults, were adopted as heirs by aristocratic childless individuals or couples. But I have again tended to include such cases. I have also included some individuals who falsely claim to have been adopted or fostered, as well as names erroneously included in other lists of famous adoptees, in order to set the record straight.

The list is mostly of people I consider to be appropriate role models, so it excludes people who are notorious for their misdeeds rather than famous for their positive achievements: serial killers (yes, unfortunately several are adoptees) and other criminals. But it does include people like the Emperor Nero, who if not good role models, were at least influential.

I've also, as of February 2003, decided not to include any more people whose activities or fame rest only or mainly on their activities as adoption activists of one kind or another. This is not to demean their contributions to society, but simply to avoid overwhelming the list. Most of these people have written books about their lives or work, and these books are listed on Websites dealing with adoption literature., such as Pact: An Adoption Alliance's Website.

You have probably never heard of many if not most of the people on this list. So why are they included? The list is not just of famous Americans and Europeans. I include people from all cultures and times, and I've considered a person's influence on his or her own culture and time, rather than use the simplistic and ethnocentric measure of whether I (an American living in Europe) have heard of him or her.

There is certainly bias in the list, most of which can be put down to my access to biographical sources and my own linguistic limitations; some of which can be put down to my own life history and my children. (I had better explain these. I was born and raised in the USA, of white and Native American ancestry, but have lived overseas for nearly 30 years, in Germany, New Zealand, and especially Wales. Our four adopted children all have different ethnic backgrounds, including: New Zealand and Cook Island Maori, Guyanese, Welsh, Scottish, English, Irish, African and African-Caribbean.) The places I have lived and these ethnic connections have influenced the kinds of books I read and my sensitivity to picking up on clues. So you will find probably a bias towards Polynesian, African-Caribbean, Native American, British, New Zealand and American entries. Another factor is that in some cultures adoption and illegitimacy still carry great stigma and adoptees try to conceal their backgrounds. The greater openness of American- and British-influenced societies leads to more information being known about the origins of adoptees from those countries.

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