Finding Families, Finding Ourselves traces the history of adoption in English Canada from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. Each chapter directs readers to a particular set of individual stories--childrearing, legislation, class relations, gender, religion, ethnicity and race,Aboriginal-settler contact, international exchanges, and (re)connection--that shaped and informed the thinking and practices of adoption as they emerged over the years. Relying on public records rather than interviews, author Veronica Strong-Boag examines a number of diverse sources includinglegislation, the popular media, royal commissions reports, biographies and autobiographies, and fiction and poetry to provide an unexplored vantage point from which to assess the overall development of adoption as a central and all too often under-appreciated institution in English Canada.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a professor of women’s and gender studies and of educational studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a past president of the Canadian Historical Association. She has written widely on the history of Canadian women and children—including studies of the 1920s and 30s, the experience of post—WW II suburbia, Nellie L. McClung, E. Pauline Johnson, childhood disabilities, and modern neo-conservatism’s attack on women and children—and has won the John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History, the 2012 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences awarded by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and, with Carole Gerson, the Raymond Klibansky Prize in the Humanities. In 2012 Strong-Boag was awarded the Tyrrell Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding work in Canadian history. She is the author of Fostering Nation: Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage (WLU Press, 2010).

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