"How This Occurred I Cannot Say": Record-Keeping and Double Age in Nineteenth-Century New York City Orphan Asylums

Abstract

"How This Occurred I Cannot Say":Record-Keeping and Double Age in Nineteenth-Century New York City Orphan Asylums Sarah Mulhall Adelman (bio) In 1845, a little over a year after the Leake and Watts Orphan Home opened its doors, Superintendent Samuel Ferguson had a problem. Some of the older boys were disrupting the order of the institution and exerting a negative influence on the other children. The state only empowered the institution to indenture children after they reached the age of fourteen, but none of the boys in question had passed that milestone birthday, according to the institution's records, so Ferguson convinced the Board of Trustees to petition the state legislature for permission to occasionally indenture boys as young as twelve. For some boys, Ferguson argued, their individual circumstances indicated they should transition to the next phase of childhood—one often referred to as "youth"—at a younger chronological age.1 While managers pursued this legislative avenue, Ferguson explored an alternate path. Based on his own observations, Ferguson was convinced that many of these boys were actually older than the institution's records indicated and, as such, would be eligible for indenture even without legislative intervention. Since most of the early arrivals had come from Long Island Farms, the children's branch of the almshouse, Ferguson consulted almshouse records to discover the children's true ages. Vindicated, Ferguson wrote to the Board of Trustees, "Having been for a long time satisfied that the ages of the boys in the Orphan House as stated in our Register, were incorrect, I visited the Alms House . . . and I find a great difference between their register + ours." As evidence, he produced a table contrasting the two registers and noting each boy's "real" age at the time.2 Even with these revised ages, many of the boys Ferguson had hoped to indenture had still not reached the age of fourteen. Unable to secure permission [End Page 363] from the state legislature for earlier indentures, Ferguson's next step was less clearly documented. And yet, suspiciously, over the next two years, some of the boys' ages were quietly changed in Leake and Watts's records—changes that accelerated the boys' departure from the orphanage into indentured work. This case illustrates many elements common to the use of chronological age in institutional care for children in nineteenth-century New York. With few exceptions, those running the institutions asserted that chronological age defined the transition points between stages of childhood and therefore determined the proper treatment and conditions for individual children. However, the records on which institutional staff relied to determine a child's age were often imprecise, inconsistent, or, as demonstrated in the vignette above, even a fiction. In addition to the fact that in many cases—especially with children not in the care of biological parents—a child's precise date of birth was neither known nor knowable, records frequently contained inaccurate mathematical calculations, a lack of precision in calculating chronological age, confusion caused by multiple transfers of custody, and sometimes—as in the case of Superintendent Ferguson—active attempts to falsify a child's recorded age. A close analysis of these records unmasks the irony inherent in discussions of the "proper" chronological age for children to transition between phases of childhood and reveals that while nineteenth-century institutions sometimes present a veneer of record keeping we associate more with the Progressive Era, their methodology had not yet caught up with their ambition. Historians have increasingly sought to unravel understandings of chronological age and stages of life. The Leake and Watts case study serves as a necessary reminder of the unreliability of chronological ages referenced in nineteenth-century institutional records, even when these appear certain and precise. It also suggests that while it can only occasionally be clearly pinpointed, many dependent children were likely impacted by the concept of double age, with the age in institutional record books guiding their treatment, regardless of whether it was in fact their true chronological age. In some cases, this was the result of decisions by those in charge of children's care to influence a child's eligibility or status, while in many other cases gaps...