Genealogy research with Gramps

Add to that, in the UK at least, legal adoption is very much a 20th-century practice. (And I think there is no limit to the number of adoptive parents a child can have. Plus, kids can be left in a will...)

I don't know whether legal adoption even existed before that, but it was very much the norm, if the wife died, any kids were given away (to family members if they were around, or to various charities if they weren't).

And quite often, if family circumstances changed, children that had been given away were taken back.

I suspect I'm quite lucky to know my family because, even then (back in the thirties) that practice was quite common, and my grandmother died when my father was two years old. Granddad remarried within the year, though, iirc, so that may have had something to do with it ...

Cheers,
Wol