In Monday’s column, Juliana Smith cautioned readers not to assume both parents are dead if children are found to have lived in an orphanage.

In fact, I urge people to consider that, in some cases, both parents were living. That is exactly the situation of my mother and her sisters. Both parents were alive but unable to care for the little girls, so they went to the local orphanage. In this case, the girls never returned to their mother or father's home, so tracking the family through census records would have been difficult.

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