"Everyone's been good to me, especially the dogs": foster-children and young paupers in nineteenth-century Southern Iceland

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Gisli Agust Gunnlaugsson

Introduction

Parent-child relations in the European past have attracted considerable academic interest since the 1960s. During the 1970s and early 1980s historical research into the subject was largely concerned with questions relating to attitudes towards children and the treatment of children in former times.(1) During the 1970s and 1980s various scholars explored other issues closely related to the history of childhood. Thus, during the 1970s Peter Laslett published on parental deprivation in the English past, to mention but one example.(2) Judging by the relative scarcity of publications on orphans and stepparenthood during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the subject he raised does not seem to have attracted much attention internationally.(3) This changed during the latter part of the 1980s when historians increasingly began to address problems such as child abandonment, the position of orphans and relations between stepparents and stepchildren in the past.(4)

John Boswell has directed some attention to child abandonment in medieval Iceland,(5) whereas hardly anything has been written on the subject of child abandonment, fostering and orphans in the country during the early modern and modern periods. This is somewhat surprising since during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a considerable percentage of households in the country included children other than offspring of the head of household. An investigation into family and household structures in seven Icelandic parishes between 1801 and 1816 revealed that the proportion of foster-children ranged between 2.5 per cent and 18.3 per cent of all children residing in the individual parishes.(6)

The position of foster-children within the family in nineteenth-century Iceland is liable to have varied considerably.(7) Hypothetically it has been argued that some of them probably had the same, or a similar, status within the family as blood descendants of the couple heading it. Other may have been "private paupers" of the family, i.e. children who resided with the family (for various reasons) for a certain period of time, without the commune or their parents (or other relatives) paying for their maintenance.(8)

The ambition here is to shed some light on the question why children were fostered by persons other than their parents in nineteenth-century Iceland. By analyzing sources such as censuses, parish registers and catechetical registers, I shall attempt to determine the relative number of foster-children in the county of Arnessysla in southern Iceland and the percentage of households including such members. Furthermore, by investigating two groups of foster-children randomly chosen from the censuses of 1845 and 1870, I shall try to establish whether or not there were kinship ties between foster-children and the families to which they belonged. Finally, I shall discuss the plausible position of foster-children as compared with the position of young paupers in Icelandic households during the nineteenth century.

Problems of a Definition

The Icelandic censuses list two different categories of children and youth other than offspring of heads of households and hired servants: paupers and foster-children. Paupers are a well defined category and do not pose a problem when dealing with Icelandic household structure in the past. The same does not apply to foster-children. In the census of 1801 occupational and household status of each individual is recorded in Danish, while Icelandic is most often used in subsequent censuses.(9) Even if more than one term is used to designate foster-children (fosterbarn, opfostringsbarn, plejebarn) in the 1801 census, these hardly allow for different interpretations. The same cannot be said about later censuses compiled in Icelandic. These list two categories of "foster-children": fosturborn and tokuborn. There is a definite qualitative difference between the use of these terms in modern Icelandic. The first, which may be translated into English with the term foster-children, indicates a better household status than the latter, which implies that the children in question were "taken in" by household heads, without--or with less--emotional involvement. The census enumerators have, however, not accounted for the use of the terms, nor have statisticians publishing statistical analyses based on the censuses qualified how they use them. It seems that these children have merely been tabulated with other dependents of household heads.

Evidence drawn from the Icelandic Dictionary Institute at the University of Iceland does not help to clarify the problem. It appears that the terms were interchangeable in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usage. Censuses were usually compiled by parish priests or communal directors (hreppstjori) in each of the more than two hundred communes in the country. Owing to a large number of enumerators working without specific definitions of the terms fosturborn and tokuborn, the terms are likely to have been randomly used. Thus, both terms are, for instance, interchangeably used for children fostered by their grandparents. Furthermore, they are in a few cases alternatively used in catechetical registers to designate the household position of the same child in two different calender years.