"Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to 'aging out' out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse.... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren't as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds...

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, ORPHAN TRAINS fills a grievous gap in the American story. Tracing the evolution of the Children's Aid Society, this dramatic narrative tells the fascinating tale of one of the most famous — and sometimes infamous — child welfare programs: the orphan trains, which spirited away some 250,000 abandoned children into the homes of rural families in the Midwest.
In mid-nineteenth-century

...

"With his mother dead, his father gone, and his older brothers and sisters unable to help, eight-year-old Ethan Cooper knows it's his responsibility to keep him and his younger siblings together--even if that means going to an orphanage. Ethan, Alice, Simon, and Will settle into the Briarlane Christian Children's Home, where there's plenty to eat, plenty of work, and plenty of talk about a Father who never leaves. Even so, Ethan fears losing the only...

One of the many immigrants struggling to survive in 1850s New York, Elise Neumann knows she must take action to care for her younger sisters. She finds a glimmer of hope when the New York Children's Aid Society starts sending skilled workers to burgeoning towns out west. But the promise of the Society's orphan trains is not all that it seems. Born into elite New York society, Thornton Quincy possesses everything except the ability to step out from...

A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.