For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5,000 children...
No one knows or perhaps cares to remember the exact day the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis closed. What is known is that 69 years ago, in late November or early December, the place workers later called "a house of horrors" closed its doors for good.
Shutting the Children's Home Society down may have cast it into obscurity, but by then the home had already permanently changed the lives of more than 5,000 children. The unimaginable horror of the place still reverberates today not because many of the children were orphaned or abused but because they were stolen.
The little-known story caught the attention of fiction author Lisa Wingate when she saw a late-night episode of "Deadly Women" on the Discovery Channel about the children's home matriarch, Georgia Tann.
"I wondered if it was all true or was sensationalized for TV," Wingate told Insider. "So I started digging. I had to know more." The result was "Before We Were Yours," a fictional account of the orphanage told through the eyes of 12-year-old Rill Foss. Released in 2017, the book stayed on top of best-seller lists for over a year.
"People would write or email and say, 'This book is about my mother' or 'I think I might be one of the stolen babies,'" Wingate said.
https://www.insider.com/georgia-tann-tennessee-children-home-society-survivors-speak-out-2019-12
Important but tough read...
= new reply since forum marked as read
