Georgia Tann

Aftermath

Tann is estimated to have stolen over 5,000 children. New York and California vowed to take action, but the children's adoptions were never investigated, and no children were restored. Tann died of uterine cancer three days before the state filed charges against the society, thus escaping prosecution.

In her book, Rural Unwed Mothers: An American Experience, Mazie Hough makes the argument that the implementation of social work standards in Tennessee without providing the needed funding contributed to abuses in the system. The Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal resulted in adoption reform laws in Tennessee in 1951. Tann's custom of creating false birth certificates for adoptees (which she did to hide the origins of the child) had become standard practice nationwide.

Before the 1920s, adoption was a rare practice in the United States, with the Boston Children's Aid Society placing only five children per year. By contrast, in 1928, Tann placed 206 children with adoptive families. Believing in class distinctions, Tann felt that children should be taken from low-income families and placed with what she called "people of the higher type." has no connection with Georgia Tann nor the society which she operated.

Personal life In 1922, Tann adopted an infant girl whom she named June. In her book about Tann, Barbara Raymond recounted June's daughter Vicci, saying, "Mother said Georgia Tann was a cold fish; she gave her material things, but nothing else. I don't know why she bothered to adopt her."

While the cohabitation of two financially independent women, referred to as "Boston marriages", had once been socially acceptable, such arrangements began to be viewed as suspiciously homosexual. In March 1925, Atwood placed an announcement in the local paper that she had secretly married a Captain George A. Hollinsworth of San Francisco, California and that the couple would be moving there to live. Tann and Atwood Hollinsworth hid the true nature of their relationship. Tann adopted Ann Atwood Hollinsworth on August 2, 1943, in Dyer County, Tennessee, a legal provision that same-sex couples used at the time to ensure that their partners would inherit their property. Tann died of uterine cancer and inherited the home she and Tann shared, which Tann had purchased in August 1949.

Beginning in the 1930s, Tann began to acquire real estate properties. Some she sold at a profit, at least on one occasion financing it herself. In October 2019, Wingate and Judy Christie released the book Before and After: The Incredible RealLife Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society. It is a nonfiction companion to Wingate's novel.

The made-for-TV film Stolen Babies debuted in 1993. Directed by Kim Moses, it tells the story of a social worker that Moses and her writing partners interviewed, Annie Beales, who was the whistleblower on the Society. Beales is played by Lea Thompson; Tann is played by Mary Tyler Moore, who won an Emmy for her performance. the March 15, 2019, episode of the Criminal podcast titled "Baby Snatcher"; and the April 30, 2019, two-part episode of the Behind the Bastards podcast titled "The Woman Who Invented Adoption (By Stealing Thousands of Babies)".

She is the subject of Barbara Bisantz Raymond's 2007 nonfiction book The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.

In 2010, Devereaux "Devy" Bruch Eyler published her memoir No Mama, I Didn't Die — My Life as a Stolen Baby to tell her story as a stolen baby and victim of Georgia Tann. She grew up knowing she was adopted but did not know, until she was in her 70s, that she had been stolen from her birth mother—a mother who, Eyler had been told, was dead. Eyler met her sister, Patricia Ann Wilks of Germantown, Tennessee, for the first time in 2009.

Tann is featured in the 2019 novel, The Pink Bonnet by Liz Tolsma.

She is featured in an episode of Stuff You Should Know released on 25 April 2024 called "The Awful Crimes of Georgia Tann".

Notable cases

In 1990, the Los Angeles Times published the story of Alma Sipple. Georgia Tann had taken her daughter Irma in the spring of 1946 under the pretense of providing medical care; a few days later, however, Tann informed Sipple that her daughter had died of pneumonia and had already been buried. Sipple was devastated by grief but suspected the child was still alive. However, her efforts to find her daughter at the time were fruitless. Years later, in 1989, she happened to be watching Unsolved Mysteries and recognized Georgia Tann as the woman who had taken her child. As the show suggested, she wrote to Tennessee's Right to Know, a volunteer agency in Memphis that reunites families separated by adoption. They soon found Irma, whose name was then Sandra Kimbrell, and the mother and daughter reunited by phone. Sipple's story was featured again in the podcast Criminal.

Professional wrestler Ric Flair (b. 1949) was adopted from the Tennessee Children's Home Society. His 2004 autobiography To Be the Man (2004) begins with the opening chapter, "Black Market Baby", discussing his birth and childhood.