Tennessee Children's Home Society

It is most often associated with Georgia Tann, its Memphis branch operator and child trafficker who was involved in the kidnapping of children and their illegal adoptions.

[4] The home was permitted to take on more children if the local county could pay the $75 appropriation and if there were sufficient space in the orphanage for the child.

The article analyzed the behavioral traits of a foster child who was a ward of the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Nashville.

[11] Georgia Tann's place in Memphis society and her connections throughout the community helped her build a strong network of supporters, including Tennessee legislators, socially prominent families and Camille Kelley, the Shelby County Family Court Judge through which many of the Society's adoptions were finalized.

However, the public thought it odd that the head of a charitable organization that could barely balance its books was chauffeured about in expensive Packard limousines.

[citation needed] Following a 1950 state investigation, it was revealed that Tann had arranged for thousands of adoptions under questionable means.

[14] State investigators discovered that the Society was a front for a broad black market adoption ring, headed by Tann.

Though they were unable to find direct evidence that Kelley received payments from Tann for her assistance, investigators noted that her yearly income could not have otherwise supported her lifestyle (which included a maid, expensive clothes and flowers, and a chauffeur-driven Cadillac).

In some cases, Tann obtained babies from state mental hospital patients and hid the information from adoptive parents.

Tann would take the newborns under the pretext of providing them with hospital care and would later tell the mothers that the children had died and that their bodies had been buried immediately in the name of compassion.

[18] The Georgia Tann/Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal resulted in adoption reform laws in Tennessee in 1951.

Well-known personalities associated with Tann and the Society include: Over several decades, nineteen of the children who died at the Tennessee Children's Home Society under the care of Georgia Tann were buried in a 14 by 13 feet (4.3 m × 4.0 m) lot at the historic Elmwood Cemetery (Memphis, Tennessee) with no headstones.