Very Poor (Financially) Adoptive or Foster Families
Baiul, Oksana
Baiul was born in Dnepropetrovsk. Different sources give the year as 1977 or 1978 and the date as 26 February, 16 October and 16 and 26 November. Her surname is spelled Bayul or Baiul, acco... [more]
Baker, Josephine
Baker (the surname of her second husband) was born Josephine Carson to an unmarried couple in the slums of St. Louis, Missouri. Her father abandoned the family before she was a year old, an... [more]
Beley, Ennis
Beley was born the fourth child of an unmarried drug addict, Patricia Smith, in Los Angeles. From a few days old he was fostered by a 60-year-old single man, Howard Glen, who raised him as ... [more]
Best, James
Best was born Jules Guy in Powderly, Kentucky, to a poor coal mining family with six children. When he was three poverty forced the family to place him in an orphanage, but he was adopted t... [more]
Brooks-Randolph, Angie
Brooks was one of nine children, and her parents were forced by poverty to place her in a foster home where she was brought up by a widowed seamstress. Ambitious to become a lawyer, she ... [more]
Brown, Leslie Calvin
Brown and his twin brother, born in a Miami ghetto, were adopted at six weeks of age by a single woman. He was hyperactive as a child and labeled a slow learner. After high school he bec... [more]
Brown, Rita Mae
Brown was born to an unmarried woman who left her in an orphanage. She was soon placed with birth relatives who adopted her. She was raised in poverty on a farm in the rural South and now f... [more]
Byrd, Robert C.
Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr. His mother died in 1918 or 1919 during the flu pandemic and his father sent him to live with and be adopted by her sister and brother-in-law, an impo... [more]
Casals, Rosemary
Casals was born to poor El Salvadoran immigrant parents in San Francisco. Before she was a year old her parents sent her and her older sister to be raised by their great aunt and uncle. Thi... [more]
Cochran, Jacqueline
Cochran was born sometime between 1906 and 1910, and was orphaned as a baby. She was a foster child in a feckless, poverty-stricken family (she got her first pair of shoes when she was eigh... [more]
