Street Children, Children Who Grew up Alone

Without Adult Supervision (at Least Temporarily), or Ran Away from Home or Care

Baca, Jimmy Santiago

When their parents divorced and abandoned them, Baca, aged two, and his siblings were sent to live with grandparents. By the time he was five his mother had been murdered by her second husb... [more]

Bellwood, James Charles

Bellwood was born James Charles Robertson to an unmarried Maori woman and a European salesman. He was fostered or adopted by the Bellwood family of Christchurch, who emotionally and physica... [more]

Brady, John Green

Brady was born in New York. His mother died when he was very young. His father remarried, but Brady seems to have been unhappy with his step-mother, and he ran away from home when he was ei... [more]

Choi Yong Sul

Choi was born in Choong Chung province, Korea, then under Japanese occupation. A Japanese shopkeeper in his village, who had no sons, kidnapped Choi when he was about eight years old and to... [more]

Fitzgerald, Ella

Fitzgerald's birth parents both died when she was a child; she never knew her father and her mother died about 1935. Some sources state that she earlier ran away from her abusive step-fathe... [more]

Glazier, Sidney

Tom Glazer and Sidney Glazier (they spelled their last names differently) were two of the three sons born in Philadelphia to Jewish immigrants from Minsk. Their father died i... [more]

Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram

Hedgewar was the fifth of six children of a very poor family in Nagpur. His father was a Hindu priest. When he was 13 both his parents died the same day in one of the epidemics of bubonic p... [more]

Henson, Matthew Alexander

Henson was orphaned as a boy and was mistreated by his uncle. He ran away and lived on the streets for a while, until he was taken in by a Miss Janey, who ran a café where he worked and whe... [more]

Houdini, Harry

Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a Jewish rabbi and his wife. The family immigrated to the USA when he was four, and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. The family was so poor ... [more]

Jacobs, Peter

Jacobs' entire immediate family died while he was a young child and he grew up poor and alone. He converted to Christianity about 1827 and became an interpreter for Methodist missionarie... [more]