The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal-some of whom learned the reality from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family as a result of its wide reach

From your 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business on the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She provided up more than 5,000 orphans customized to the desire lists of willing parents-hiding the fact that lots of weren’t orphans at about Before and After: The Amazing Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s House Society all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor family members, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their infants had died.

The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought fresh knowing of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who understood small about their pasts gained insight in to the startling facts behind their family histories. Prompted by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees within this book, many driven Tann survivors set out to track their roots and find their birth family members.

Before and After includes moving and occasionally shocking accounts of the ways that adoptees had been separated off their initial families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the ultimate decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate describe first meetings that are the sweeter and even more intense for period missed and of families from completely different public backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. Within a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims from the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis using the authors to reclaim their tales at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . with remarkable results.

Advance praise for Before and After

“In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate deal with the true tales behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, from the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s House Society. Having a journalist’s keen vision and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the tales that influenced Before We Had been Yours using the lives which were changed due to reading the book. Readers will become informed, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed reserve.”-Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Story and The Lost Young ladies of Paris