On the morning of April 19, 1930, Joseph and Mrs. Adams opened the door of their home in Montevideo, Minnesota, and found an infant girl resting on the doorstep. Someone had apparently left her there during the night and disappeared.
For most families, such a discovery would have been a once-in-a-lifetime event.
For the Adams family, it had happened before.
Exactly 14 years earlier, on April 19, 1916, the couple had opened their door and found an abandoned baby boy. They took him in and raised him as their own. By the time the second child appeared, he had grown into what the newspaper described as a happy 14-year-old youth.
The repetition of the date was remarkable enough to invite speculation. The newspaper suggested that the two children might be brother and sister, abandoned by the same mother. Perhaps, it imagined, she had returned after 14 years, seen that her son had been given a good home, and decided to entrust another child to the same family.
It was a touching theory, but only a theory.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams nevertheless planned to raise the baby girl just as they had raised the boy.
Second Abandoned Child Left With Same People
MONTEVIDEO, Minnesota. — On one morning recently, when Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Adams of Montevideo opened the door of their house they beheld a baby on the door step, evidently left there during the night, perhaps by the baby’s mother.
But the strange part of it is that just 14 years before, to the day, they also found a baby on their door step.
The first child, left there April 19, 1916, was a boy, and the child left there April 19, 1930, is a girl.
Perhaps the two waifs are brother and sister. Perhaps the mother, returning 14 years later, seeing her first child grown to a happy youth, and feeling her children would have little opportunity in the world should she keep them, is giving them up with a mother’s prayer.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams are rearing he first child, and also plan to do the same with the second.
Source: The Redwood Gazette. Redwood Falls, Minn. May 28, 1930.
