Vivian smiles. She looks down at Becca, who is gazing up at her with large hazel eyes. “Now then. Where shall we begin?”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The strands of this novel—Minnesota, Maine, and Ireland—have been woven together with the help of a number of people. Visiting my husband’s mother, Carole Kline, at her home in Fargo, North Dakota, a number of years ago, I read a story about her father, Frank Robertson, that appeared in a volume called Century of Stories: Jamestown, North Dakota, 1883–1983 edited by James Smorada and Lois Forrest. The piece, “They Called It ‘Orphan Train’: And It Proved There Was a Home for Many Children on the Prairie,” featured Frank and his four orphaned siblings who were placed in foster care in Jamestown and eventually all adopted by the same family. Though they were not, as it turned out, “orphan train” orphans, my curiosity was piqued. I was stunned to learn about the breadth and scope of the orphan train movement, which transported a reported two hundred thousand children from the East Coast to the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.

In the course of my research, I spoke to Jill Smolowe, a writer and reporter for People, who thought there might be enough material on the surviving “train riders,” as they call themselves, for a People magazine feature. Though the story never materialized, the folder of material and contacts Jill compiled proved tremendously useful. Most significant, Jill introduced me to Renee Wendinger, president of the Midwest Orphan Train Riders from New York organization, whose mother, Sophia Hillesheim, was a train rider. At the Orphan Train Riders of New York’s forty-ninth reunion in 2009 in Little Falls, Minnesota, Renee introduced me to half a dozen train riders, all now in their nineties, including Pat Thiessen, a train rider from Ireland whose experience uncannily resembled the one I had sketched for my character. Throughout the writing of this novel Renee has patiently and generously offered her wise counsel in ways large and small, from correcting egregious errors to providing historical nuance and shading. Her book, Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York, has been an invaluable resource. The novel would not have been the same without her.

Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children’s Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum; the Ellis Island Immigration Museum; and the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas, a museum and research center with a vibrant online presence that includes many train rider stories. In the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library, I found noncirculating lists of orphaned and indigent children from the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling, first-person testimonials from train riders and their families, handwritten records, notes from desperate mothers explaining why they had abandoned their children, reports on Irish immigrants, and many other documents that aren’t available anywhere else. Books I found particularly helpful include Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story by Andrea Warren; Children of the Orphan Trains, 1854–1929 by Holly Littlefield; and Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (which I found at Bonanzaville, a pioneer prairie village and museum complex in West Fargo).

During my years as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, I was privileged to receive a Faculty Fellowship and a Fordham Research Grant, which enabled me to conduct research in Minnesota and Ireland. A fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts gave me space and time to write. Irish native Brian Nolan took me on an insider’s tour of County Galway. His stories about his childhood housekeeper Birdie Sheridan provided inspiration for Vivian’s grandmother’s life. In the village of Kinvara, Robyn Richardson ferried me from pubs to Phantom Street and handed me an important resource: Kinvara: A Seaport Town on Galway Bay by Caoilte Breatnach and Anne Korff. Among other books, An Irish Country Childhood by Marrie Walsh helped me with period and place details.

At the same time that I was writing this book, my mother, Tina Baker, began teaching a course on Mount Desert Island in Maine called “Native American Women in Literature and Myth.” At the end of the course, she asked students to use the Indian concept of portaging to describe “their journeys along uncharted waters and what they chose to carry forward in portages to come,” as she writes in the compilation of their narratives, Voices Yearning to be Heard: Acadia Senior College Students Pay Tribute to the Missing Voices of History. The concept of portaging, I realized, was the missing strand I needed to weave my book together. Additional titles shaped my perspective: Women of the Dawn by Bunny McBride, In the Shadow of the Eagle: A Tribal Representative in Maine by Donna Loring (a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation and a former state legislator), and Wabanakis of Maine and the Maritimes by the Wabanaki Program of the American Friends Services Committee. The websites of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the Penobscot Indian Nation provided valuable material as well.

I relied on good friends and family for support, counsel, and advice: Cynthia Baker, William Baker, Catherine Baker-Pitts, Marina Budhos, Anne Burt, Deb Ellis, Alice Elliott Dark, Louise DeSalvo, Bonnie Friedman, Clara Baker Lester, Pamela Redmond Satran, and John Veague. My husband, David, read the manuscript with a keen eye and a generous heart. Penny Windle Kline briefed me on adoption protocols and provided crucial resources. Master Sergeant Jeffrey Bingham and his uncle Bruce Bingham, a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army, offered fact checking for the World War II sections of the novel. Bunny McBride, Donna Loring, Robyn Richardson, and Brian Nolan read sections relevant to their expertise. Hayden, Will, and Eli, my sons, gently corrected any errant teen-speak. My agent, Beth Vesel, was in her remarkable way both mentor and friend. And my editor at Morrow, Katherine Nintzel—in addition to her usual good sense and intelligent advice—suggested a structural change at the eleventh hour that transformed the narrative.

This book would not exist without the train riders themselves. Having been privileged to meet six of them (all between the ages of ninety and one hundred) and read hundreds of their first-person narratives, I am filled with admiration for their courage, fortitude, and perspective on this strange and little-known episode in our nation’s history.

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the author

Meet Christina Baker Kline

About the book

Christina Baker Kline Talks with Roxana Robinson

A Short History of the Real Orphan Trains

Reading Group Guide

About the author

Meet Christina Baker Kline

Karin Diana

CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. In addition to Orphan Train, her novels include Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water.

Kline also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She coauthored a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins, with her mother, Christina L. Baker, and she coedited About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror with Anne Burt.