Accessing Historical Records From the Tennessee Children's Home Society Case
The Tennessee Children's Home Society operated from roughly 1925 to 1968 in Chattanooga, run by Pearl Currier and later her daughter Inez. The organization was at the center of a massive adoption scandal that came to light in the late 1960s, when investigators discovered children had been taken from impoverished families and placed with wealthier couples without proper legal oversight. Hundreds of children were affected. The photos from that era are what most people end up searching for, whether they're doing genealogical research or trying to understand what happened to their family. The original photographs aren't in some single downloadable archive. They're scattered across a handful of institutions, and figuring out which one has what takes some legwork. The biggest collection is held by the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Museum, which acquired a significant portion of the Society's records when the case broke. You'll also find materials at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville and some items within the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Special Collections. The photos themselves fall into a few categories. There are intake photographs — the kind taken when a child was first brought to the facility, usually a simple head-and-shoulders shot. Then there are group photos of children at holiday events or school pictures, and later there are placement photos showing kids with their new families after being "adopted." Each type tells you something different and requires different handling.
If you're looking to access them, start by contacting the Bicentennial Museum's reference desk. They have an online finding aid that covers the scope of the collection, though it's not fully digitized. I spent about three weeks last year trying to track down a specific photo my grandmother had mentioned, and the fastest path was calling the museum directly rather than filing a formal public records request. They put me in touch with the archivist who could pull the box, and I was able to review the photos in person within two weeks of my initial call. A formal FOIA request through the state would have taken considerably longer and cost more in processing fees. The Tennessee State Library and Archives maintains a separate collection that includes some of the court documents from the 1969 trial. Those documents reference photographs but don't always include copies of them. This is a common frustration — researchers assume that because a photo is mentioned in a court exhibit list, it will be available in the archive with the filing. It usually isn't. The original photos often stayed with the children's attorney or were returned to families at some point during the proceedings.
What to Expect When You Request or View Them
The photos are fragile. Most were printed on cheap fiber-based paper stock that was standard for institutional photography in the 1950s and early 60s. The chemical composition of those prints has degraded significantly over time, and handling them requires white cotton gloves. The archives typically only allow viewing on-site, not printing or personal photography, though you can sometimes request professional scans through the institution's reproduction services. Expect to pay around $2 to $5 per copy for a standard scan, depending on the archive. One thing that catches people off guard is the naming conventions used in the file systems. The Society didn't maintain consistent records. Some boxes use the child's legal name at intake, some use the name they were given by their adoptive family, and many are filed under case numbers that cross-reference multiple children. I learned this the hard way when I was searching for a sibling pair who had been placed separately. Their files were in completely different boxes because they'd been processed through different intake windows. I found them only after pulling every box from the 1958-1960 range and comparing case numbers manually. The digital resources that do exist are limited but worth checking first. The FamilySearch catalog sometimes has indexed records from this collection, and the Tennessee Virtual Archive (TeVA) has a small subset of digitized materials. Neither is comprehensive. The RootsMagic and Ancestry community forums also have threads where researchers share what they've found, which can save you a trip to Chattanooga if someone else has already located the specific photo you need.
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A Problem That Doesn't Get Discussed Enough
The biggest gap in these records is the children who were never formally documented. Several accounts from the era describe children who arrived at the Society without birth certificates, without known family names, and without any intake photo. These are the hardest cases to research, and the archives don't have a separate designation for them. If you're searching for someone who falls into this category, you'll need to pivot to oral history — interviewing older siblings or descendants of the nursing staff who worked there. I found a leads sheet from a former aide that listed children by nickname rather than name, and that became the key to unlocking three separate cases that had no paper trail at all. There's also the issue of photos that were removed from files before the Society collapsed. Former employees and families have come forward over the years with personal photographs that never made it into any official collection. These exist in private hands and occasionally surface at genealogy conferences or through family history Facebook groups. There's no central registry for them, and no repository is actively soliciting donations at this point, which means a lot of potentially important visual evidence is just sitting in shoeboxes in people's attics, slowly deteriorating. If you're starting this research, budget about two to three weeks for a first pass through the public archives, and plan for follow-up visits. The staff at these institutions are generally helpful but underfunded, so responses to emails can take a week or more. Don't expect to download a folder of images and call it done. The work here is physical and slow, and that's the honest version of what it takes.
