Georgia Tann was actually an American child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an adoption agency located specifically in Memphis, Tennessee. She had used the particular unlicensed home as a front for her own disgusting and cruel black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s up until a state investigation into numerous instances of adoption fraud being perpetrated by her own self closed the institution in the year 1950.
As the executive director of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, Georgia Tann got really rich by stealing babies from their own parents and then adopting them out to unsuspecting families. More than 5,000 children had been snatched by Georgia Tann, and at least 500 children are believed to have unfortunately died while under her care.
According to history, Georgia Tann began working at the Mississippi Children’s Home Society, but she got fired for ‘dubious child-placing practices’ that official documents alarmingly don’t elaborate on. She then saw the market that baby adoption could be a lucrative business. She arranged expensive out-of-state adoptions, skims off the top, and then shredded the evidence. The only problem, at that point, was procuring enough marketable babies. It seems that Memphis simply did not produce enough orphans for Georgia Tann’s liking, and there were only so many she could coerce from poor families, so she started straight-up stealing them. It was not even safe in the hospital as well because nurses and doctors were in on it. Other than that, the children could also be taken right off the playground.
She did not immediately place all these babies into the semi-capable arms of the semi-affluent families. Between the stealing and the selling, she had to put them somewhere. That place was Tennessee Children’s Home Society, where they were subjected to neglect that included the denial of medication and food. Many of the kept children were also straight-up abused, even sexually, sometimes by Georgia Tann herself. That is such a horrifying experience for them.
Adoptions in Tennessee at the time went for about $7 a baby, and Georgia Tann decided to up that a bit. She charged for background checks that she didn’t do, documents that she didn’t file, inflated travel expenses, and for some older prospective parents, essentially for the privilege of getting to adopt anyone at all. She padded the bill so heavily that she made over $1 million peddling children. Despite making all this paper, she did very little of the actual paperwork. On top of that, she also practiced exclusively closed adoptions. That means no information about the birth parents to anyone, and also no information about the children to anyone, either. It is a license to keep people in the dark, and if Georgia Tann’s enthusiasm for shredding is any indication, keeping people in the dark was the name of the game.
Sources: YouTube Weird History.