My great-grandparents adopted a son to carry on the family name, while my grandparents also adopted a son to carry on the family name.
I have vague recollections of finding out that a neighbor kid or a classmate (I can’t remember which) was adopted, but being about six years old myself, I didn’t really understand it too well and it was no big deal to me at the time. Just like a lot of kids, my brothers and I would joke around and tease each other with, “You’re adopted!” but in truth, at that age, I never put two and two together to realize that in order to be adopted by someone, a child would have to be given up by someone or taken away from someone.
When I was in high school, one of my teachers told us that he and his wife had adopted two sisters about fifteen years earlier. They (the sisters) had been in some terrible homelife situation before he and his wife found out about them, he and his wife had no biological children of their either before or after taking in the sisters, who were both in college when he told us the tale.
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