A Twist to Oliver Twist

Jessie B. Ramey has an old sepia-toned photograph, circa 1891, of her great-great-grandfather, James Caldwell. In the photograph, Caldwell-whose wife died in childbirth, leaving him a widower with four mouths to feed-sits in the middle of the frame, flanked on all sides by his children dressed in their Sunday best. You would never guess from the photograph that, at the time the shot was taken, the children were living in an orphanage.

Most people's ideas of orphanages in the 19th century stem from Charles Dickens novels, a world full of parentless street urchins and sad sack children begging, "Please, sir, I want some more." Yet Ramey knew from her grandmother's stories that James Caldwell didn't "give up" his children. When his wife died, he simply used the local orphanage as a place to keep his children safe and well fed while he got back on his feet-a 19th-century version of foster care.

Ramey wondered whether this was the case for other parents in early American history, and that question led her to develop the thesis, "A Childcare Crisis: Poor Black and White Families and Orphanages in Pittsburgh, 1878-1929," which re-conceptualized orphanages as a form of child care and explored the development of institutional child care.

The thesis earned Ramey (HS'91, HS'03, HS'09) not only her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University last year, but also three prestigious national awards.

Organization of American History's Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize in Women's History
National Academy of Social Insurance's 2010 John Heinz Dissertation Award
Herbert G. Gutman Dissertation Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association.

The awards add to her legacy at Carnegie Mellon, where she was the Founding Director of Carnegie Mellon's Undergraduate Research Office and where she became a third-generation graduate (eight family graduates and counting).
-Bradley A. Porter (HS'08)

A Twist to Oliver Twist

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