Tales From an Orphanage

About the Book

Life inside St. Pauls's Orphan Asylum (Pittsburgh, PA) for three young girls in the late 1920's and 1930's unfolds years later when they recall their memories for Jeans's daughter.  As a young woman, Marjorie Jean blamed her mother for her short comings and lack of self-esteem, but after becoming a mother herself, she realized that her mother had done the best job she could given her childhood circumstances.

Stories of mean nuns with straps ever at the ready, an even meaner pair of deaf and blink Irish spinsters, and the anguish of being separated from their brothers and sisters after the death of their mother, and desertion by their father, is relived in the womens's own words.

After years of adjusting to the life in the orphanage, doing as they were told, always without questions, placement in foster homes sometimes was worse.  Marty remembered one home where she found herself dodging bullets.  Eventually, they were on their own, but only after bouncing back and forth between the orphanage and foster homes for years.

About the Author