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Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: A History of Adoption in Canada
This is a broad survey of the history of adoption in Canada. Strong-Boag uses the analytic lenses of race, class, religion, and gender to examine the historical meaning of adoption, for adoptive and biological parents and for children.
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First published July 1, 2006
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October 5, 2025
Veronica Strong-Boag’s Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: A History of Adoption in Canada is a landmark contribution to Canadian social and legal history, one that recasts adoption not as a marginal phenomenon but as a deeply revealing lens on family, identity, and nationhood. Strong-Boag traces adoption’s trajectory from nineteenth-century informal child transfers to twentieth-century sealed records, closed adoptions, and ultimately to increasing calls for openness and genealogical knowledge. Throughout, she situates adoption practices within the interlocking forces of class, gender, race, religion, and colonialism, showing how notions of “deserving” families, racial norms, and social respectability shaped who could adopt and how adoption was practiced.
One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in how it combines legal and institutional history with lived experience. Strong-Boag does not treat adoption as a purely administrative project; she gives agency to relinquishing mothers, adopting parents, and adoptees, showing how all struggled with memory, secrecy, belonging, and loss. Her account of how records were sealed, how “clean slates” were encouraged, and how adoptees later sought access to their origins is especially compelling. She also does admirable work in integrating the story of Indigenous adoptions and the tensions posed by adopting (or displacing) children across racial and cultural lines—an area too often marginalized in adoption historiography.
Overall, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves is a richly textured, critically insightful history that forces us to reckon with how adoption has shaped and been shaped by power, identity, and belonging in Canada. It is essential reading for scholars of family history, childhood studies, Indigenous history, and social policy.
One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in how it combines legal and institutional history with lived experience. Strong-Boag does not treat adoption as a purely administrative project; she gives agency to relinquishing mothers, adopting parents, and adoptees, showing how all struggled with memory, secrecy, belonging, and loss. Her account of how records were sealed, how “clean slates” were encouraged, and how adoptees later sought access to their origins is especially compelling. She also does admirable work in integrating the story of Indigenous adoptions and the tensions posed by adopting (or displacing) children across racial and cultural lines—an area too often marginalized in adoption historiography.
Overall, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves is a richly textured, critically insightful history that forces us to reckon with how adoption has shaped and been shaped by power, identity, and belonging in Canada. It is essential reading for scholars of family history, childhood studies, Indigenous history, and social policy.
Displaying 1 of 1 review