The truth behind this photo of sisters holding hands is more tragic than you think.
On March 8th, 2024, Dr.
Elena Rodriguez sat in the basement archives of the New York Foundling Hospital, surrounded by boxes of historical records dating back to the institution’s founding in 1869.
She was a social historian specializing in child welfare systems in late 19th century America, and she had spent the past 6 months researching the practices of orphanages and asylums during that period.
The founding hospital had been one of New York City’s largest charitable institutions, housing hundreds of orphaned and abandoned children at any given time.
Its records were extensive but disorganized with thousands of documents, ledgers, and photographs stored half-hazardly in cardboard boxes that showed decades of water damage and neglect.
Elena was examining a box labeled photographic records 1890 1895 when she found it.
a formal studio portrait of two young girls, perhaps 8 and 10 years old, standing side by side in matching dark dresses.
What made the photograph striking was the way the girls held hands, not casually, but desperately, their fingers intertwined so tightly that even through the sepia tones of the century old image, Elena could see the tension in their grip.
The photograph was mounted on thick cardboard backing.
On the reverse side, written in careful handwriting, was a notation.
Sisters Margaret and Clara Jensen, photographed June 14th, 1892.
Pre-placement documentation, MEK.
Elena had seen hundreds of orphanage photographs during her research.
Most showed children posed formally, their expressions blank or frightened, their bodies rigid with the discomfort of unfamiliar situations.
But this photograph was different.
The girls faces showed something beyond discomfort.
They showed fear and grief and a desperate clinging to each other that suggested they knew something terrible was about to happen.
Elena photographed the image with her camera and made notes about the file location.
Then she began searching through the box for any other documents related to Margaret and Clara Jensen.
She found an intake form dated March 1891, noting that the girls had been brought to the Foundling Hospital after their mother died of tuberculosis.
Their father was listed as unknown or deceased.
The form was unclear.
They had no other living relatives.
She found placement records dated June 15th, 1892, one day after the photograph was taken.
And as Elena read through those records, she began to understand why the girls in the photograph had been holding hands so desperately.
They had been saying goodbye.
Elena spent the following week immersed in the foundling hospital’s records, trying to understand the institutional practices that had separated Margaret and Clara Jensen.
What she discovered was a system that, despite its charitable intentions, routinely destroyed families in the name of efficiency and economic practicality.
In the late 19th century, orphanages faced constant overcrowding and inadequate funding.
The solution adopted by many institutions, including the founding hospital, was a system called placing out, sending children to live with families who would provide them with homes in exchange for their labor.
It was presented as a humane alternative to institutional care, giving children the opportunity to grow up in family settings rather than in crowded dormitories.
In reality, the system often amounted to indentured servitude.
Children were sent to farms, factories, and households where they worked long hours with minimal education and no legal protections.
And crucially for Elena’s research, the placement system made no provisions for keeping siblings together.
Children were sent wherever openings existed with no consideration for maintaining family bonds.
The record showed that Margaret Jensen, aged 10, had been placed with the Whitmore family in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a milltown north of Boston.
The placement form indicated she would work in the household and when old enough, in one of Lawrence’s textile mills.
The Witmores had requested an older girl capable of substantial domestic work.
Clara Jensen, age 8, had been placed with the Morrison family in Ithaca, New York, a farming community in the Fingerlakes region.
The Morrisons had requested a young girl to help with household tasks and eventually with farm work as she grew older.
The two placements were approximately 300 m apart, an enormous distance in 1892, when most workingclass people never traveled more than a few miles from their homes.
The girls would have no means of communication, no way of visiting each other, and no realistic hope of reunion.
Elena found a memo in the administrative files from the orphanage director dated June 1892 explaining the rationale.
While it is regrettable that siblings must sometimes be separated, the practical necessities of placement require us to accept whatever suitable homes become available.
The children will adapt to their new circumstances and the emotional attachments of childhood will fade as they mature and establish themselves in their placements.
The cold bureaucratic language made Elellena’s stomach tighten.
She returned to the photograph of Margaret and Clara looking at their intertwined hands and devastated faces and thought about the emotional attachments that the director had dismissed so casually.
The initials me on the back of the photograph provided Elena’s next lead.
She searched through the founding hospital’s employment records and found a match, Mary Elizabeth Kendrick, listed as a placement assistant from 1891 to 1894.
A note in her personnel file indicated she had been released from employment due to philosophical differences with institutional policies.
Elellena tracked down more information about Mary Kendrick through newspaper archives and city directories.
Kendrick had been a social reformer, part of a growing movement of women who challenged the practices of charitable institutions and advocated for better treatment of poor and orphaned children.
After leaving the foundling hospital, she had worked with several reform organizations and had published articles criticizing the placing out system.
Most significantly, Elena discovered that Kendrick had donated a collection of papers to the New York Public Library in 1923.
The collection included correspondents, journal entries, and photographs documenting her work with orphaned children.
Elena requested access to the collection and spent 2 days reviewing boxes of materials that provided an insider’s view of the orphanage system.
Kendrick’s journal entries from June 1892 were particularly revealing.
On June 14th, she wrote, “I photographed the Jensen sisters today before their placements tomorrow.
It is the practice to document children before sending them out, creating a record in case questions arise about their identities or origins.
But I also photograph them for another reason, to preserve evidence of what we are doing to these children.
Margaret and Clara know they are being separated.
They clung to each other throughout the sitting, and when I asked them to hold hands for the portrait, they gripped each other as if they could prevent the separation through sheer physical force.
My heart breaks knowing that tomorrow they will be torn apart, likely never to see each other again.
This system is cruel, whatever its proponents claim about providing homes for orphans.
Another entry dated June 15th.
The Jensen girls were collected this morning by their respective placement families.
Clara sobbed so violently that she made herself sick.
Margaret tried to be brave, but was shaking so badly she could barely walk.
I gave them each a copy of their photograph, telling them to keep it safe so they would always remember each other.
The orphanage director saw me do this and reprimanded me later, saying I was encouraging the girls to dwell on the past rather than adapt to their futures.
I no longer know how much longer I can continue in this work.
Elellanena began the difficult task of tracing what had happened to Margaret and Clara after their separation.
She started with Margaret, whose placement in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provided a more urban setting with better recordkeeping than rural Ithaca.
The 1900 United States Census listed Margaret Jensen, age 18, as a border in a Lawrence tenement.
Her occupation listed as mill worker.
She was no longer living with the Witmore family who had taken her in 1892.
Elellanena searched for any records explaining this change and found documentation in the Lawrence City Archives.
A court record from 1897 showed that Margaret had petitioned for release from her placement at age 15, claiming mistreatment by the Whitmore family.
The brief court document noted that she had been subjected to excessive labor and inadequate provisions for education and that the court had granted her petition, allowing her to leave the placement and find employment independently.
She had been working in textile mills since then.
Elena found additional information in the records of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Lawrence, where Margaret had apparently been a member.
The church registry included a notation from 1898 indicating that Margaret had come to the priest seeking help locating her sister.
The priest, Father Michael Okconor, had written to several orphanages and child placement agencies trying to trace Clara Jensen, but his letters had gone unanswered or had received responses indicating that the agencies had no authority to provide information about placed children.
The registry included a heartbreaking note.
Miss Jensen returns every few months asking if I have received any response regarding her sister.
I have nothing to tell her.
The agencies refuse to provide information, citing policies about confidentiality and the need for children to establish new lives without dwelling on past connections.
I believe these policies are unjust, but I am powerless to change them.
Elena found Margaret’s name in subsequent census records.
The 1910 census listed her at age 28, still working in the mills, still unmarried, still living in a boarding house.
By 1920, now 38, she had become a supervisor in one of the mills, a modest advancement that suggested competence and determination.
Then Elena found Margaret’s death certificate dated December 1943.
She had died at age 61 from lung disease, likely related to decades of breathing cotton fibers in poorly ventilated factories.
The certificate listed her as unmarried with no children.
Under closest living relative, someone had written none known.
The phrase devastated Elena.
Margaret had spent 51 years alone, separated from her only family, and had died with no one to claim kinship with her except distant bureaucratic records that documented her existence.
Tracing Clara proved more challenging.
Rural records from 1890s Ithaca were less systematically preserved than urban documents from Lawrence.
Elena spent days searching through county records, church registries, and local newspaper archives, looking for any mention of Clara Jensen or the Morrison family who had taken her.
She finally found a lead in the records of the Tomkins County Alms House, a facility that provided shelter for the indigent, elderly, and mentally ill.
An admission record from 1905 listed a Clara Morrison, aged 21, admitted due to nervous collapse and inability to maintain employment.
The birth date matched Clara Jensen’s age, and the admission form included a note that she had been raised by the Morrison family of Ithaca, but was not their biological daughter.
The Alms House records painted a grim picture.
Clara had worked on the Morrison farm for 13 years from age 8 until age 21.
In 1905, she had experienced what the records termed a mental breakdown and had been unable to continue working.
The Morrison family, facing economic difficulties of their own, had brought her to the alms house rather than continuing to provide for her.
The Alms House physicians notes described Clara as melancholic and withdrawn, suffering from severe anxiety and periodic episodes of acute distress.
The notes mentioned that Clara frequently spoke about a sister she had been separated from as a child and expressed intense guilt about not being able to find her.
The physician had diagnosed her condition as melancholia with obsessive features and had recommended rest and simple manual work.
Clara had remained at the alms house for 3 years.
The records showed that she did laundry, mended clothing, and helped in the kitchen.
The staff notes indicated she was generally cooperative, but prone to periods of deep sadness during which she would refuse to eat or speak.
In 1908, Clara had been transferred to the Willard Asylum for the chronic insane, a state institution on the shores of Senica Lake.
Elena’s heart sank as she read this.
Willard was notorious among historians of mental health for its overcrowding, inadequate treatment, and the tendency to institutionalize people permanently for conditions that might have been temporary or situational.
Elena contacted the Willard State Hospital Records Project, an organization that had digitized thousands of patient records from the asylum.
Within a week, she received Clara’s file, hundreds of pages documenting 39 years of institutionalization.
The intake evaluation from 1908 described Clara as a 24year-old woman suffering from chronic melancholia and anxiety neurosis.
The evaluating physician noted, “Patient expresses persistent delusion that she has a sister somewhere who is looking for her.
Patient states she must find this sister but cannot remember where she might be.
This obsessive fixation appears to be the primary manifestation of her mental illness.
It wasn’t a delusion.
Clara was right.
Margaret was looking for her.
Elena spent the next month reconstructing the parallel lives of Margaret and Clara Jensen.
Two sisters who had spent decades searching for each other while living less than 50 mi apart.
Close enough that they might have passed each other on a street or worked in neighboring towns or attended the same regional events without ever knowing.
Margaret’s life in Lawrence had been difficult but functional.
She had worked in the mills for 45 years, living in a series of boarding houses and small apartments.
She had never married and according to records from St.
Mary’s Church.
She had inquired about her sister’s whereabouts regularly until at least 1920.
The priest, who had tried to help her in 1898, had died in 1915, and his successor had been unaware of Margaret’s situation and unable to assist.
Elena found evidence that Margaret had saved money steadily throughout her working life.
Bank records from the Lawrence Savings Bank showed deposits made every month, no matter how small.
By 1940, Margaret had accumulated nearly $3,000, a substantial sum for a mill worker.
A notation in the bank records indicated she had told a bank clerk the money was in case I find my sister and she needs help.
Clara’s life had followed a drastically different trajectory.
The Willard Asylum records documented a woman whose early trauma and subsequent separation had broken something fundamental in her psyche.
The annual evaluations written by rotating staff physicians who had never met Clara before her institutionalization consistently described her as pleasant but detached, cooperative but melancholic, and fixated on finding a lost family member.
The records showed that Clara had worked in the asylum’s laundry for most of her institutionalization.
She had kept to herself, made no trouble, and received no visitors.
Several staff notes mentioned that she kept a photograph in her belongings.
An old picture of two young girls, which she looked at frequently, but refused to discuss with staff members.
Elena felt a chill of recognition.
Clara had kept the photograph Mary Kendrick had given her in 1892.
She had carried it through 13 years of farm labor, through her breakdown and admission to the alms house, through her transfer to Willard, and through nearly four decades of institutionalization.
The photograph of two sisters holding hands had been Clara’s only tangible connection to Margaret and to the life she had lost.
In 1947, Clara died at Willard at age 63.
The death certificate listed pneumonia as the cause of death.
She was buried in the asylum cemetery, a plain grave marked only with a number.
Her few belongings, including the photograph, were destroyed according to standard institutional procedure.
Margaret had died 4 years earlier in 1943 in Lawrence.
The two sisters had died less than 50 mi apart, both alone, both still searching for the other in their own ways.
Margaret through her persistent inquiries and her savings account maintained in hope.
Clara through her obsessive fixation that asylum doctors had interpreted as mental illness rather than as rational grief for a lost connection.
Elena’s research took an unexpected turn when she discovered a box of unclaimed correspondents in the New York Foundling Hospital archives.
The box contained letters that had been sent to the orphanage between 1892 and 1920 requesting information about former residents.
Most had been marked unable to respond, insufficient information, or no forwarding address available.
Among these letters, Elena found three that made her hands shake as she read them.
The first, dated October 1898, was written in careful labored handwriting.
Dear sir or madam, my name is Margaret Jensen.
I was placed from your institution in 1892 with a family in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
I am writing to inquire about my sister Clara Jensen who was placed at the same time.
I wish to know where she was sent so that I may write to her.
We were separated and I have not heard from her in 6 years.
Please send me any information you have.
Respectfully, Margaret Jensen.
The letter had been stamped, insufficient information to respond, and filed away unanswered.
There was no evidence that anyone had made any effort to look up Clara’s placement records or to forward the inquiry to the appropriate authorities.
The second letter was dated March 1905.
To the director of the Foundling Hospital, I am writing again regarding my sister, Clara Jensen.
I wrote several years ago, but received no response.
I am now 23 years old and working in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
I have steady employment and a respectable living situation.
I wish to locate my sister and offer her a home with me if she desires it.
Please, I am begging you to help me find her.
We have been apart for 13 years and I think of her everyday.
Margaret Jensen.
This letter had been annotated.
Policy prohibits disclosure of placement information to former residents.
Letter filed without response.
The third letter was dated June 1914.
Dear director, this is my third letter to you over the past 16 years.
I am writing once more to beg for information about my sister Clara Jensen.
We were separated when I was 10 years old and she was 8.
I am now 32 years old.
I have worked hard and saved money.
I can provide for my sister if you will only tell me where she is.
I have tried every other avenue I can think of.
Church organizations, city directories, letters to newspapers.
Nothing has produced any information.
You are my last hope.
Please, I am begging you to show compassion and help me find my only family.
With desperate hope, Margaret Jensen, someone had written on this letter.
Policy remains unchanged.
Do not respond.
Elena sat in the archive reading room staring at these letters and felt a rage building in her chest.
While Margaret was writing these desperate pleas, Clara was already institutionalized at Willard, her mind broken by years of labor and loss.
If anyone at the founding hospital had bothered to look up the placement records, to make a few inquiries, to show the barest minimum of human compassion, these sisters might have been reunited.
Elena created a map plotting the locations where Margaret and Clara had lived throughout their lives.
What she discovered was almost unbearable in its cruel irony.
The two sisters, separated by institutional policy and bureaucratic indifference, had lived their entire adult lives in remarkably close proximity.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Margaret had worked in the mills, was approximately 280 mi from Ithaca, New York, where Clara had labored on the Morrison farm.
After Clara’s transfer to Willard Asylum in 1908, the distance had shrunk dramatically.
Willard was located on the eastern shore of Senica Lake and Lawrence was in northeastern Massachusetts, a distance of approximately 320 mi.
But the train routes between them ran through common hubs in Albany and Syracuse.
More striking was a discovery Elena made in the records of the Lawrence textile mills.
In 1912, the mill where Margaret worked had participated in a labor dispute that drew national attention.
Workers from mills across the northeast had come to Lawrence to show solidarity with the strikers.
Among the documented visitors was a delegation from textile mills in central New York, including mills in Auburn, just 15 mi from Willard Asylum, where Clara was institutionalized.
Elena found a photograph in a labor newspaper from March 1912, showing a group of mill workers marching in Lawrence during the strike.
In the background, barely visible but identifiable through careful examination, was Margaret Jensen, then 30 years old, carrying a sign demanding better working conditions.
At exactly the same time, Clara Jensen was 35 mi away, washing laundry in the Willard asylum, unaware that her sister was so close.
Elena found another near miss.
In 1920, the Lawrence Savings Bank, where Margaret maintained her account, had a correspondent relationship with a bank in Geneva, New York, just 8 mi from Willard.
Margaret had made a deposit at the Geneva branch in May 1920 when she was passing through on a rare trip to visit a fellow mill worker who had retired to the area.
Clara was at Willard on that same day, working in the asylum vegetable garden.
The most devastating discovery came from Margaret’s effects inventoried after her death in 1943.
Among her possessions was a 1938 tourist brochure for the Fingerlakes region of New York with a root map showing various attractions.
Someone, presumably Margaret, had circled several towns in pencil, Ithaca, Geneva, Auburn, Senica Falls.
She had been looking in exactly the right area, decades too late to find Clara on the Morrison farm, but close to where Clara was actually institutionalized.
Had Margaret taken that trip? Had she traveled to the Fingerlakes region, searching for Clara? The records didn’t say, but the circled map suggested that even after 46 years of separation, Margaret was still trying to find her sister, still hoping for reunion, still refusing to accept that their childhood goodbye had been permanent.
As Elena’s research expanded, she began to understand that Margaret and Clara’s tragedy was not an isolated incident, but rather a systematic pattern that had affected thousands of siblings separated by the placing out system.
She found documentation of similar cases throughout the foundling hospital records and in the archives of other institutions.
The policies that had prevented Margaret from locating Clara were standard across most orphanages and child placement agencies of the era.
They were justified on several grounds.
Protecting the privacy of adoptive and placement families, encouraging children to adapt to their new circumstances without dwelling on past connections, and avoiding the administrative burden of maintaining contact between separated siblings.
But Elena’s research revealed a darker motivation.
Many placement agencies received payment from the families who took children, either as direct fees or as reimbursement for the child’s transportation and initial provisions.
Children who maintained contact with siblings or who sought to return to their original families were less valuable to placement families.
They were seen as less committed to their new situations and more likely to be difficult or to leave their placements.
Keeping siblings separated and preventing them from communicating made them more compliant, more dependent on their placement families and less likely to resist exploitation.
It was in essence a form of social control disguised as institutional policy.
Elena found evidence of this in an internal memo from 1895 written by the founding hospitals director to his board of trustees.
Our policy of non-disclosure regarding sibling placements has proven effective in reducing the number of children who abscond from their situations or who request transfers.
Children who maintain hope of reunion with family members are less settled and less satisfactory to the families who have agreed to take them.
While this policy may seem harsh, it serves the greater good of ensuring that placements remain stable and that families continue to accept children from our institution.
The memo made Elena physically ill.
It reduced the grief and trauma of separated children to an administrative problem and justified psychological torture as the greater good.
She found similar policies documented in the records of other institutions.
The New York Juvenile Asylum, the Children’s Aid Society, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, and dozens of smaller charitable organizations.
Thousands of siblings had been separated with no means of finding each other.
Their connections severed permanently in the name of institutional efficiency.
Elena conducted searches through death records, trying to estimate how many of these separated siblings had ever been reunited.
The results were devastating.
Of the 247 sibling groups she was able to trace through placement records and subsequent documentation, only 12 showed evidence of successful reunion, less than 5%.
The vast majority, like Margaret and Clara, had spent their entire lives separated, searching, grieving, and ultimately dying alone.
On November 15th, 2024, Dr.
in Elena Rodriguez stood in the exhibition hall of the New York Historical Society preparing for the opening of an exhibition titled Separated: The Hidden Tragedy of Orphan Placement in America.
The centerpiece of the exhibition was the photograph of Margaret and Clara Jensen, enlarged to nearly life-size, showing every detail of their desperate grip on each other’s hands.
The exhibition told their complete story, documented through the materials Elena had spent 8 months assembling.
The placement records showing their separation.
Mary Kendrick’s journal entries describing her horror at the system.
Margaret’s unanswered letters begging for information.
Clara’s asylum records documenting her obsessive fixation on finding her sister.
The map showing how close they had lived without knowing.
And finally, their death certificates listing them both as having no known relatives.
Elena had written the exhibition text herself, refusing to soften the brutal realities.
Margaret and Clara Jensen were 8 and 10 years old when this photograph was taken on June 14th, 1892.
The next day, they were separated by the orphan placement system and sent to families 300 m apart.
They would never see each other again.
For the next 50 years, Margaret searched for Clara, writing letters, saving money, and maintaining hope that they would be reunited.
Clara’s grief at the separation contributed to a mental breakdown that led to her institutionalization for nearly 40 years.
They died 4 years apart, less than 50 mi from each other, both alone, both still mourning the sister they had lost as children.
Their tragedy was not unique.
It was replicated thousands of times across America’s orphan placement system, a system that prioritized institutional convenience over human connection and that destroyed families in the name of charity.
The exhibition opening drew significant media attention.
Newspapers across the country ran stories about the Jensen sisters, often featuring the photograph of the two girls holding hands.
Television news programs interviewed Elena about her research.
Social media discussions spread the story widely with many people sharing their own family histories of separated siblings and lost connections.
But the most meaningful responses came from descendants of other separated siblings.
Elena received dozens of letters and emails from people who recognized their own family stories in Margaret and Clara’s tragedy.
Some had known vaguely that grandparents or great-grandparents had been orphaned and placed out, but they had never understood the full implications until seeing the exhibition.
One letter came from a woman named Patricia Walsh, whose grandmother had been placed from the founding hospital in 1897.
My grandmother rarely spoke about her childhood, Patricia wrote.
But she kept a small photograph of herself with two other children, and she would cry whenever she looked at it.
I never understood why until I saw your exhibition.
Those children in her photograph were her siblings, and she never saw them again after she was placed.
Thank you for telling this story.
My grandmother died in 1978, still grieving for the brother and sister she had lost 80 years earlier.
Elena also received inquiries from genealogologists and family historians asking for help tracing separated relatives.
She worked with several to search through placement records.
And in three cases, she was able to help living descendants of separated siblings find each other.
Great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of brothers and sisters who had been torn apart a century earlier.
The photograph of Margaret and Clara holding hands became an iconic image reproduced in textbooks and documentaries about child welfare history.
But for Elena, it remained deeply personal.
She had spent nearly a year with these sisters, reconstructing their lives from fragments of documentation, and she felt the weight of their tragedy in a way that academic distance could not diminish.
On the final day of the exhibition, Elena stood alone in the gallery after closing, looking at the photograph one last time before it was packed for travel to other museums.
Margaret and Clara looked back at her, their young faces frozen in that moment of desperate connection, their hands clasped with a strength born of terror and love.
The photograph survived.
The story survived.
And now Margaret and Clara Jensen would be remembered not just as anonymous victims of a cruel system, but as two sisters who loved each other, who never stopped searching for each other, and whose tragedy illuminated the human cost of policies that valued efficiency over compassion.
Their grip on each other’s hands, preserved in a photograph taken 132 years ago, had finally brought them back together.
Not in life, but in memory, in recognition, and in the determination to ensure that no future children would suffer as they had suffered.
