About this item
The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal - some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate's bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents - hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children's Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.Advance praise for Before and After"In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate's blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society. With a journalist's keen eye and a novelist's elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book." - Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan's Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris
About the Author
Author Judy Christie loves to read, write and talk about books. An award-winning journalist, Judy is the co-author of "Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society," a project that combines her love of stories, her Southern heritage, and her journalism background. She wrote the book with longtime friend Lisa Wingate, author of the bestseller "Before We Were Yours," a fictional account of the Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal.Judy's appreciation for interviewing began in elementary school, where she was editor of The Barret Banner, and continued in her work as a newspaper reporter and editor. Her interviews with the heroes of the Tennessee Children's Home Society tragedy tell stories of love and loss through the voices of adoptees, now in their seventies and eighties, and their families - and the unexpected blessing of a gathering of adoptees.Judy also has written a series of nonfiction self-help books and three series of Southern novels, including the Green, Louisiana, and Wreath Willis series.She writes daily and has kept a diary since she was eleven--and still has all of them. She is also an avid letter writer and loves to create mail art.Judy writes a #booklover column at www.shreveporttimes.com and invites you to visit her online. You can find her on Facebook @JudyChristieAuthor and Twitter @judypchristie.For contests, book announcements, and chitchat about books, sign up for her free e-newsletter at www.judychristie.com.Judy and her husband, a Tennessee native, live in rural Colorado where they share their place with the occasional bear and the ravens they are trying to befriend.
