This Social Worker Was Supposed to Help Orphans Find Homes. Instead, She Abducted Children Who Already Had Families and Sold Them for Profit

Between 1924 and 1950, Georgia Tann placed more than 5,000 children—many of them seized from their parents without permission—with wealthy families across the U.S

Jordan Friedman | History Correspondent

September 23, 2026 7:45 a.m.

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In 1949, a young, pregnant mother dropped off her three children outside a courthouse in rural Tiptonville, Tennessee, then drove away with a man who’d promised her marriage and a new life.

Three-year-old Sue Nell Dycus and her brothers, ages 5 and 6, sat waiting, confused and uncertain of what was to come. Even before that day, the siblings had endured significant trauma and loss. Food had been scarce, and their mother, unable to read or write, had struggled to find steady work after the murder of their father.

Sometime later, a big, black car pulled up to the courthouse. Out stepped Georgia Tann, a woman in her late 50s. “Come with me,” she said before ushering them into the vehicle. The siblings believed that Tann was a nurse, but she was actually the head of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society (TCHS), a private nonprofit that oversaw orphanages in the state but was authorized only to place children in foster care.

At a time when state adoption regulations in the United States were fragmented and loosely enforced, Tann operated an illegal black-market business, selling more than 5,000 children to wealthy families across the country between 1924 and 1950. Some parents willingly left their children behind, but many were forcibly separated from their babies and stripped of their parental rights. Tann was heralded as the “Mother of Modern Adoption” even as she built an intricate network of corrupt politicians and civic leaders who shielded TCHS from legal interference.

As the Dycus siblings traveled from Tiptonville to Memphis, their hopes of remaining together were quickly quashed. Sue Nell was placed at the TCHS mansion, while her brothers went to a separate facility. Tann “knew by the time she got us in the car that my middle brother would have fought her tooth and toenail to not let me out of the car, so she took him out first,” says Sue Nell, who is now known as Sallie Brandon, the name given to her after she was placed with her adoptive parents.

Like many of Tann’s victims, Brandon—now 80 and living in Huntsville, Alabama—wouldn’t reunite with her birth family for decades. The process was complicated by Tann systematically falsifying birth records, as well as a 1951 Tennessee law that placed state adoption records under seal. Although Tann is widely credited with destigmatizing adoption, an estimated 500 children died in her care, and she illegally amassed an estimated $1 million through her long-running scheme (nearly $14 million today), most of which was used to fund her lavish lifestyle. It wasn’t until just a few days before her death in 1950 that state officials formally ordered an investigation into the society.

“She popularized adoption. She commercialized it. She imbued it with secrecy,” says Barbara Bisantz Raymond, author of The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption. “Her direct victims found it often impossible to ever find their birth families. And that’s a terrible thing.”

From Mississippi to Memphis

In 1916, Tann landed a job as a field agent at the Mississippi Children’s Home-Finding Society, where she was tasked with placing orphans in foster homes.

At the time, legal adoptions were relatively rare, with the eugenics movement shaping attitudes about the practice. Now discredited, the pseudoscientific ideology argued that reproduction among “unfit” populations, including poor people and certain racial minorities, weakened the biological quality of the human race.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, many child welfare professionals classified orphans and children born to unmarried parents as part of a lower social class and, therefore, ill-suited for adoption. Although the U.S.’s first private adoption agencies opened around this time, many desperate, destitute mothers instead left their newborns with workers at foundling asylums; maternity wards; or unregulated, often squalid “baby farms,” where many infants were either sold for profit or died from starvation or neglect.

Tann came up with her own solution to this problem. “She developed both her business and the institution of adoption by doing something unprecedented: making homeless children acceptable, even irresistible, to childless couples,” Raymond writes in The Baby Thief.

Early in her career, Tann made the jump from simply rehousing children to unlawfully abducting them. One of the earliest documented instances of such misconduct dates to 1922, when Tann lured a 2-year-old boy playing outside his family’s cabin in Mississippi into her car while his pregnant and recently widowed mother slept inside. Tann’s father, a state court judge, signed papers declaring the boy an abandoned child and his mother an unfit parent. The toddler was put up for adoption, and his 3-year-old brother later faced the same fate.

Locals ran Tann out of the state under unclear circumstances shortly thereafter. She went on to work briefly at an orphanage in Texas, where she reportedly adopted a daughter of her own, before moving to Memphis. There, she set up shop at TCHS’s Shelby County location, operating much “like a battle ax,” Raymond says. “She just immediately appropriated all the children that she wanted to place for adoption, and she just started sending them out.”

Politicians, corrupt judges protected Tann

Tann wasn’t deterred by the fact that TCHS wasn’t licensed to place children up for adoption. Her father had connections in Memphis, which helped Tann, then in her 30s, cultivate ties with powerful politicians, the most influential of whom was E.H. Crump, known widely as “Boss Crump.” The multimillionaire businessman and insurance executive wielded power first as Memphis’ mayor and then as the Shelby County trustee, a position he held into the early 1920s. The so-called Crump machine would retain a tight grip on Tennessee politics for the next few decades.

“She gets in with Boss Crump—that gives her the perfect nest,” says Lisa Wingate, co-author of Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, written with journalist Judy Christie. “It connects her to a lot of important people.” Those relationships gave her “all the abilities to basically operate outside the law, and she begins [this] business of providing ‘made-to-order’ children for people to adopt.”

Known for her “domineering attitude,” in the words of a Nashville newspaper story, Tann was a skilled marketer. Almost immediately after landing in Memphis, she went door to door collecting donations and pontificating on the benefits of adoption to local merchants, arguing that the practice benefited not only children but also the taxpayers who paid to fund the city’s orphanages. She advertised and shared photos of adoptees in local newspapers, gaining national attention in December 1929 for a Christmas campaign that proclaimed “blonds, by the way, are in the majority.”

According to The Baby Thief, Tann preferred white, blond-haired and blue-eyed children “because she thought her clients would” and because “she favored that coloring herself.” She portrayed the babies she sold not as genetically flawed but as “blank slates” who could be developed however their adoptive parents envisioned. As Wingate says, her approach had a “social engineering type [of] underpinning.”

Tann was known to descend on poor families’ homes, often accompanied by juvenile court employees, social workers or law enforcement. She lured children into her car and abducted them in broad daylight. Police officers ignored complaints from young, impoverished and unmarried mothers who said that their babies had been abducted from hospitals. Parents were falsely told that their children were stillborn or had died shortly after birth, or that they’d be returned once they had received medical care. Without thorough investigations of Tann’s clients, judges—most notably Camille Kelley—issued illegal court orders sanctioning the adoptions.

Mothers and children torn apart

Mary Reed was 18 years old and unwed when her newborn son was taken from her in 1943. As Reed recalled in a 1992 interview with “60 Minutes,” Tann asked her to sign supposedly routine papers at a hospital while still groggy from anesthesia. After learning that the documents were, in fact, adoption papers, Reed went to TCHS but was turned away. She then brought her fight to court but was unable to reclaim her baby.

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Many parents simply didn’t have the resources to recover their children. Local judges informed them that their babies “had been given to people who have more than you can provide, and you won’t be getting them back,” says Wingate, who is also the author of Before We Were Yours, a novel based on the TCHS operation.

In some instances, Tann ripped apart entire families. Peggy Koenitzer, 70, of New Jersey, spent years unraveling the birth history of her late mother, Norma Sue, who was abducted at age 8 in the early 1940s. Tann coaxed Norma Sue and five of her six siblings, including her twin sister, into a car while they were playing outside their family’s shack along the Mississippi River. The children’s mother and their eldest sibling weren’t home at the time, and their father was in a drunken stupor.

“To me, it does sound like the parents were pretty negligent,” Koenitzer says, “although it still does not give Georgia Tann the right to come in and steal the children and keep them and adopt them out across the country.”

By the later years of Tann’s operation, many of the youngest adoptees were housed at the society’s mansion, while older children were sent to other boarding homes. Brandon says that she doesn’t personally recall Tann abusing her or others at the TCHS mansion. But The Baby Thief includes several accounts of physical and even sexual abuse at Tann’s facilities. As Raymond writes, “Children were denied access to bathrooms at night but were beaten for wetting their beds.”

Brandon recalls “parties down in the parlor” in which Tann would “dress the children up if they were walking, or [she was] even carrying them, and take them down for a meet-and-greet with potential parents.”

“Some of the children would disappear that day,” Brandon recalls. “You’d never see them again. She would bring them in, and the parent would select whatever child they wanted, pay her the money, and they’d be gone.”

While many contemporary estimates suggest that Tann arranged the adoptions of 5,000 to 6,000 children, Wingate argues that these figures might have been much higher. Despite the existence of similar black-market adoption businesses across the U.S. between the 1920s and ’60s, Tann “had the opportunity to do it on a much larger scale, and publicize it and make it her career and her claim to fame,” Wingate says.

Children sold for profit

By the 1930s, state adoption laws still varied, though a growing number had started requiring suitability investigations before children were placed into homes. Many of Tann’s clients found themselves unable to adopt conventionally, often due to old age. “Nobody asked questions about how she acquired the babies and began transporting them across state lines,” author and journalist Gabrielle Glaser writes in American Baby. “Nobody really wanted to know.”

At the same time, adoption had become “fashionable as a form of both family-building and altruism” among wealthy people and high-profile figures, Glaser writes. Actress Joan Crawford adopted twin daughters through Tann in 1947. Other notable clients included Hollywood couple June Allyson and Dick Powell, as well as Herbert Lehman, who served as the governor of New York.

The fees that Tann charged prospective parents varied but were often disguised as transportation costs and paid in installments: first for a phony “home visit,” then delivery of the child and finally processing of the paperwork roughly a year later. According to The Baby Thief, the majority of adoptees were placed with California and New York residents, who were typically charged a total of more than $700 (roughly the equivalent of $14,000 today), though some couples reportedly paid as much as $10,000 (roughly $200,000). Checks were usually made out to Tann personally and sent to her private post office box.

Qualifying adoptive parents would have paid significantly less to adopt from reputable agencies, but Tann’s process was much faster. Tann also skillfully drew in her clientele by promulgating “the idea that these are actually superior kids that she has chosen and picked out,” Wingate says. “They have superior intellects and talents in art or music or whatever it is you’re looking for. She creates fake histories for them.”

When Koenitzer’s mother and her twin sister were placed with a family in Philadelphia, Tann claimed they were 6 years old, even though the girls insisted that they were 8. “My grandparents didn’t have anything to base it on, and they just kind of went with what Georgia Tann said,” Koenitzer explains. “That was another thing that my mother was extremely upset about.”

Some adoptees ultimately led happier lives than others. Koenitzer acknowledges that her late mother, who went on to have five children of her own, was “raised in a very good home” but says that she “just could never get over what had happened or let go. She was never happy.”

Brandon was placed in the care of an older couple from Pulaski, Tennessee, who paid Tann roughly $1,000. Her adoptive parents separated a short time later, at which point she and her mother relocated to Key West, Florida.

“She was absolutely wonderful to me,” Brandon says. Eight years after their arrival in Florida, however, her mother died, and she began living with her alcoholic father. He remarried, then died less than a year later, leaving Brandon in the care of a stepmother with whom she had a tumultuous relationship.

“I didn’t grow up with cousins or brothers or aunts or uncles or grandparents. I had nobody,” Brandon says. “It was either go back in the system or stay with her, and she thought it looked good to keep me.”

Investigating Tann

The dark underbelly of Tann’s black-market operation remained hidden from public view for nearly two decades, even as she delivered speeches in Washington, New York City and other major cities; advised Eleanor Roosevelt on child welfare; and secured an invitation to President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that Tann’s unethical methods became more widely noticed—and scrutinized. The society’s Memphis branch lost its endorsement from the Child Welfare League of America in 1941 due to its destruction of adoption records and practices that were “far below generally accepted standards.”

Local pediatricians complained about children dying in Tann’s care, and letters poured in from lawyers across the country, who demanded information about the adoptees being placed with their clients. By the second half of the decade, Tennessee legislators had proposed two separate bills that would have required Tann to assess the qualifications of adoptive parents and authorized the state to investigate adoption proceedings. Neither gained enough traction to become law.

Only a shift in the Tennessee political landscape would usher in the beginning of the end of this saga. The Crump machine’s influence waned significantly when, in 1948, Tennesseans elected Gordon Browning as governor and Estes Kefauver as senator. Browning, who’d heard reports about Tann’s questionable practices, announced a state investigation into TCHS in September 1950. Just a few days later, Tann died of uterine cancer at age 59.

Raymond suggests that lawmakers wanted the investigation to be a superficial one. Tann “would have brought a lot of people down with her,” the author says. State authorities waited to make an announcement until journalists had launched their own inquiries and Tann was close to death.

The TCHS mansion ceased operations by December 1950. The following year, a report sent to Browning concluded that Tann’s financial history was “shocking enough, [but] other facts came to our attention which disturbed us even more.” Investigators pointed to a large number of abducted infants who’d been “placed in nursing homes in and about Memphis, where they were without medical care.” Many died “as a direct result of violations of physicians’ orders.”

Despite these findings, nobody was ever criminally charged in the scheme, and a proposed federal investigation into TCHS never materialized. A civil lawsuit alleging that Tann had misappropriated an estimated $500,000 was later settled out of court for significantly less, as only a small portion of her estate remained by the time of her death.

In the scandal’s aftermath, the Tennessee legislature passed laws that sealed all state adoption records and made Tann’s child placements legally binding, effectively crushing many birth families’ hopes of having their children returned. But the state also tightened its regulations around out-of-state adoptions and the licensing of child-placement agencies. By the 1950s, the institution of adoption was changing amid a “trend toward the enactment of more stringent state laws regulating the adoption of children,” according to a news article that cited legislation passed in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota and New Mexico and pending in several other states.

Despite the trauma inflicted by Tann, her work helped “popularize the idea that you can adopt a child, and it can be a beautiful life for you and for the child,” Wingate says. “Public thought about adoption does change based on the visibility she’s creating for her adoption system.”

Adoptees and families search for answers

It wasn’t until the late 20th century that many of Tann’s victims found information about their birth parents, thanks, in part, to Tennessee passing a law that unsealed state adoption records. Many adoptees also began digging for answers after the scandal was featured on episodes of “60 Minutes” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” Several books on the subject, alongside advances in genetic genealogy, drove continued interest in the 2000s.

Brandon has since met with her birth mother and two brothers, who had been placed with a family in California; Koenitzer, meanwhile, has found a number of cousins and other long-lost relatives. “It was really important to me to meet all my biological family and find out what had happened to all of them,” she says. “It was quite a journey.”

Genealogical detective Allison Peacock is the founder of FHD Forensics and the advisory board chair of its nonprofit sister organization, Genealogy for Justice, which has launched an initiative to help survivors of TCHS and their families. She says that she has seen “multigenerational trauma that’s passed on over and over.”

“I think everybody deserves to know who they are,” Peacock says. “It’s one of the most basic, foundational issues we have as human beings—who am I, and where did I come from?”

Jordan Friedman is a freelance writer based in Chicago. He has contributed to Fortune magazine, USA TODAY, U.S. News & World Report, and National Geographic.