When I first read the phrase "women with their unwanted babies," I was actually disgusted and horrified. Adoption is not a foreign concept in our society, but somehow reading the date again after missing the year the first time and realising that this is a story of what happened in 1741 added enough distance to it to make it just sad and not so terrible.
When looking at the images of the shreds of clothing preserved in the records to identify children and the various assortment of objects left with them, I am reminded of accounts I have heard of the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. There is a significant difference in scale between these two incidences, but I remember listening to someone who had gone to visit the museum--I think it was my high school AP English teacher--describe the place, and there is a common theme. In the museum, my English teacher said, the thing that got to him the most were the shoes. The shoes of victims of the Holocaust are artefacts in one of the exhibits, worn, old, and empty. And seeing those shoes in the museum elicited the strongest emotional response from my teacher, more than anything else on display.
This reading was a physical handout, and when I first got it, I glossed over the text, flipped through the pages, and saw the page that is taken up entirely by the image of various objects. There is a beaded necklace or bracelet with a coin in the centre of it like a pendant or charm. There's an old key, a thimble, a ring, a large coin cut in half across its diameter, and a round, shiny, metal object that honestly reminds me of the button off of a pair of jeans. There's what looks like a wooden button, a long, lean, slit-eyed ivory fish, and a cuff with a padlock attached to it. There's a swatch of cloth, roughly frayed, with the letters M and D embroidered into it. There's a large round metal badge with letters raised on it that don't seem to spell anything, but read "S ETHEL BURGA AND S' SWITHIN" and maybe a date underneath where the shadow in the photo makes it impossible to see if there's anything else there or not. There's a metal plate with the word "ALE" and another smaller one that says "Ann Higs." There are more personal objects at the bottom: a tag shaped almost like a rounded off heart with fine script engraved on its surface that is too hard to read in the picture, but there is a date on it. There is a larger metal heart with the letters E and L engraved onto it. And there is what looks like a roughly shapen rectangular metal place or wedge, and on it is messily written, "James Son of James Concannon, late or now of Jamaica, 1757."
Some of them look sort of old, but the metal objects are still shiny, and text has not faded. While obviously some of them are very personal, about half of them also just seem like every day objects, things you would find lying around the house in the backs of drawers or cabinets when you empty them to retrieve a baking pan that doesn't get used much or in your pants pockets when you pull out the insides before doing the laundry, or maybe in the box of things you keep in your garden shed or crafting room that you get very little use out of because you don't actually garden or craft much. In the same way, shoes are just objects. We all own at least one pair (I should hope), we go to stores to buy them and they hold no emotional significance there, we sometimes give away a pair to someone with the same size as us if we have a pair that is uncomfortable or doesn't fit right, and that person might wear them and never stop to think again about how he or she acquired them. We sometimes see them on the side of the road and we usually think, "Oh, someone lost a shoe," in that gosh-darn swing-your-arm kind of tone. But most commonly, there is very little to no emotional impact from an object like this. Until you attach a story to them, these objects are inconsequential. But as soon as you flip back to the first page of this article and actually start to read about why they're featured here, you look back at that second page and they suddenly have human-like characteristics. They seem to emanate desperation or uncommunicable love or carelessness. Some of them seem to emanate grief or a wish of luck. Most of them say these things without any visible text or indication of ownership. They are not just objects anymore.
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