Orphans in the family?
Very common.
I was watching an old movie the other day, about a family in the Smokey Mountains, called " Where the Lilies Bloom," which was based on a novel by Vera and Bill Cleaver. Since I did some extensive research for a family with roots in the Smokey Mountains, I've heard so many stories of living off the land, early marriages, and good neighbors who have a fine sense of community.
The crisis in this film is that children are left orphaned when their father dies and because they do not want to be put in foster care they decide to hide his death. Of course the fact that this takes place in the Smokey Mountains makes it doable. The children can bury him without anyone knowing and they can blame to be busy with collecting herbs to make medicinals and farm work when visitors come calling to talk to their dad. It goes on for a while, the children exhausted but still attending school so as not to raise any red flags, until the worn out 14 year old daughter who leads the family admits the problem to the owner of the land whose sister wants it back. A younger daughter marries the older man who wanted to marry her, despite promises to the dying father. Thus the land they were renting becomes owned by that daughter and family.
These days in the United States we seem to be ignorant about how many children were orphaned in the old days, often because their mother died in childbirth or afterwards of related causes. Believe it or not, two children out of three were orphaned in England in Charles' Dickens days, which is why Charles Dickins novels were so popular - all those street urchins. Today's blended families are most often because of divorce. Used to be blended families were because of death.
HOWEVER, BE AWARE THAT IN THE 19th century and before, an ORPHAN was defined as a child without a father (to support the family) and if you hear that a child was orphaned in your family, their mother or a step-mother may still be living.
There are orphans in my family, and I'm still researching to find out more about the people who took them in and raised them!
