ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the institution of adoption hardly existed. There were no established legal processes, no confidential court records, birth certificates, or adoption case records, no social workers, no standards for determining the best interests of the child or, for that matter, any criteria of what constituted desirable qualities in adoptive parents. Adoption, the method of establishing by law the social relationship of parent and child between individuals who are not each other’s biological parent or child, is doubtless as old as humanity itself. By the seventeenth century, the West’s emphasis on the primacy of biological kinship and the concomitant prejudice against adoption resulted in the demise of adoption in most European countries. The history of adoption in early America reveals a past that initially broke away from Europe’s and England’s prohibition against adoptive kinship.
