A Rehoboth woman journeys back in time to solve the mystery of a

‘Butterbox
Baby’
A Rehoboth
woman journeys
back in time to
solve the mystery
of a scandalous
adoption tale
By Fay Jacobs
B
etsy Schmidt of Rehoboth always wondered why she was so drawn to the
sea. And in 2009 she discovered the reason.
After a more than 30-year search for her birth certificate and heritage,
fraught with dead ends, bureaucratic cover-ups and shocking revelations, the former
downtown Pittsburgh native learned why she loved the coast — for it seems she was
born, not in a city, and not even in the U.S., but at the edge of the sea in East Chester,
Nova Scotia, where she was part of a tragic adoption scandal so appalling it took two
federal governments and 40 years to unlock the mystery.
Schmidt, a retired teacher, Pittsburgh symphony French horn player, Possum Point
Players theater buff and now a competitive sailor with the Lewes Yacht Club, has been
on a three-decade odyssey to locate her birth parents. What she found, mostly in the
last two years, was a new extended family with a heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful
story to tell.
Just last year, Betsy learned she was one of about 300 babies who survived what was
called the Butterbox Baby Scandal at Chester’s Ideal Maternity Home, a misnomer if
ever there was one. It was only ideal for its cruel and greedy owners, William and Lila
Young. The couple ran an illegal home for unwed mothers in the rural Canadian
province where many babies died in infancy and others were sold on the black market
in the 1930s and ’40s to couples from New York and New Jersey.
Betsy Schmidt, a survivor of the Canadian Butterbox Baby Scandal, was adopted from Nova Scotia
and raised by her adoptive family in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her baby picture on a fabricated “birth certificate”
provided by the Canadian government (listing her adoptive name) is surrounded by documents
including her long-sought original birth certificate (revealing her birth name), a birth record and
naturalization papers.
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Betsy Schmidt of Lewes,
with her dog, Fanny.
A reunion in Chester,
Nova Scotia turned a
scandalous history into
a survivor’s fellowship
for this adoptee from the
Ideal Maternity Home.
At that time, according to Betsy, most homes for
unwed mothers in the United State were run by
Christian charities, and their bylaws did not permit
cross-religious adoptions. Jewish couples seeking
adoptions had limited resources. For that reason,
many of the babies adopted from the Ideal Maternity Home, like Betsy, went to Jewish families. The
home charged these desperate people anywhere
from $500 to $25,000 for an illegally adopted baby
— sums that were, for the times, staggering.
The babies adopted by U.S. and Canadian couples were the lucky ones, but they represented just
the tip of a frigid
Nova Scotian
iceberg. Children
who did not survive their birth or
who succumbed
to neglect, or
worse, at the
home, lent the
scandal its name,
because many of
them were buried
behind the home and around the area in boxes in
which butter from the LeHalve Dairy had been
delivered. The cheap, plentiful butter boxes had the
dimensions and shape of child-size coffins.
“Imagine finding all this out more than 60
“I was shown a book about the
scandal and found my birth name
and my adoptive parents’ name in
it! Imagine that, finding my name
in a book on a topic I never heard
about. I was just stunned.”
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April 2011
years later. It was completely overwhelming,” says
Betsy, quietly shaking her head. “I was shown a
book about the scandal and found my birth name
and my adoptive parents’ name in it! Imagine that,
finding my name in a book on a topic I never
heard about. I was just stunned.”
Betsy’s journey to this discovery started back in
the early 1980s when her adoptive mother died.
With her adoptive dad long gone, Betsy felt free to
search for her birth parents without hurting the
feelings of her adopted family. Besides, with no
real birth certificate in her possession, she was
having no luck getting a passport or any other
government identification.
“I did remember my mother talking about the
‘wonderful nurse Lila’ who helped them adopt me
and how lucky they were to have had the help. And
I also remember playing with another little girl
from Pittsburgh, Gail, who was helped by Lila, too.”
In fact, she also heard hushed stories of Royal
Canadian Mounted Police coming to Pittsburgh to
question some adoptive parents about their children’s origins. “Everyone kept quiet at that time,
afraid they might lose their children.”
Another clue to her mysterious past was a tattered “record of birth” document from Canada —
not a birth certificate, but simply an immigration
paper. So Betsy started to dig. First, she contacted
the U.S. Department of Justice to see how she
Photograph by Scott Nathan
could go about getting her birth certificate,
only to reach a frustrating dead end. Then
she found some of her mother’s letters
discussing an attorney from Nova Scotia
assisting women with adoptions. Along the
way she heard that there might be women
in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Home for the Aged
who might know something about longago Canadian adoptions, so she sought
help there. Nothing. The hunt was so frustrating, in fact, she dropped the search for
decades.
But over the years she was drawn to the
water, first spending summers in Atlantic
City, and then coming to Rehoboth’s coast
with a traveling theater company. The
group did cabaret performances on the
top floor of the Henlopen Hotel, and Betsy
found lodging in an apartment in the old
schoolhouse on Rehoboth Avenue, formerly Sydney’s Blues & Jazz Restaurant
and now the Pig & Fish Restaurant. Betsy
split her time between Pittsburgh and
Rehoboth, and wound up renting many
different in-town Rehoboth cottages. She
decided to buy a home and stay for good
when she discovered single-hand sailing
and a great teacher at the Lewes Yacht
Club. Sailing became a passion and
another link with the sea.
Her search for her personal history
began again in earnest in 2008 when she
was ready to apply for Social Security.
She’d paid into the fund for years with
paychecks from teaching, theater jobs and
her stint with the Pittsburgh Symphony.
But she could not start collecting Social
Security without a valid birth certificate,
and all she was getting from both the U.S.
and Canadian governments was the
runaround. “Nobody could really assist me.
I felt there was something they weren’t
telling me, but I had no real information.”
Finally, the Canadian government
issued her a clearly bogus birth certificate
showing her date of birth with the name
listed as Betsy Schmidt, which was her
adopted name, but not her actual birth
name that she would discover later. “This
helped me collect Social Security, but it did
nothing to clear up the mystery,” Betsy
says. “Obviously, nobody wanted to talk
about this.”
It wasn’t until just over a year ago, when
out of the blue, Betsy’s former sister-in-law
called and said, “There’s a woman I know
named Gail, who asked me if you were
adopted from Nova Scotia. She was asked
to write a chapter in a book about a scandal
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at the Ideal Maternity Home. She thinks
you used to play together in Pittsburgh.
Didn’t you know a little girl named Gail?”
She certainly had. Piecing together
what her former sister-in-law said, Gail
seemed to be the same person she’d spent
time with as a child. While Betsy hadn’t
seen or talked with Gail in well over 55
years, she was determined to use this lead
to continue her sleuthing. Betsy gave Gail
a call and asked about their adoptions.
And the whole story came tumbling out.
Both girls had been born at the Ideal
Maternity Home, which operated in
East Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada, from
the late 1920s through 1945. According
to a book written by Bette Cahill in
1992, William
Young was a chiropractor and his
wife, Lila, was a
midwife, although
she advertised herself as an obstetrician. In its heyday,
the home grew to a
54-room mansion,
with 14 bathrooms
and nine nurseries.
Over the years,
when conditions
there came to light, the Youngs were
tried for various crimes involving the
home, including manslaughter.
Lore has it that the Youngs would
starve “unmarketable” babies by feeding
them only molasses and water, often
killing the infants within weeks. Babies
with deformities, illnesses or those they
deemed of “dark coloration” would also
be neglected. The Butterbox Babies were
buried on and around the property.
According to a Canadian television
documentary, a newspaper ad for the
Ideal Maternity Home announced,
“Dame gossip has sent many young lives
to perdition after ruining them socially,
that might have been BRIGHT STARS in
society and a POWER in the world of
usefulness HAD THEY BEEN SHIELDED
from gossip when they made a mistake.”
It was shame that kept unwed pregnant women quiet about the appalling
neglect and dirty conditions at the home.
“It was no wonder Canadian authorities didn’t want to talk to me about this.
Nobody wanted to tell the truth, it was
too awful,” says Betsy. “I was listening to
this story and thinking that it certainly
didn’t sound like the place described in
the lawyers’ letters or by my mother about
the wonderful nurse Lila.”
Sitting and reading the Cahill book in
her cozy Rehoboth home, Betsy was
blown away. “I found my [birth] name in
the book. On page 142 it said ‘the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police reported that
Kathleen Elaine Kennedy was adopted by
the Schmidts of Pittsburgh.’ I was reading
and crying and it was so overwhelming,”
she says. Of the over 900 babies that came
from the home, only about 350 are called
survivors, mostly girls.
Not only did Gail introduce Betsy to
Cahill’s book on the subject, but she told
her about a 1994 Canadian film made of
the story. Betsy tried to
watch the film “Butterbox Babies,” but it was
difficult. She was
extremely emotional
about the discovery and
had not yet shared her
story with anyone. “It
was such information
overload. I was just
carried away by the
discovery.”
There had to be some
way to turn this shocking discovery into something affirming.
There was. Gail had also given Betsy
the name of another adoptee, Bob
Hartlen, who had been hosting “Butterbox Survivor Reunions” in Canada with
his organization called Survivors and
Friends of the Ideal Maternity Home. So
in the summer of 2009, Betsy made the
trip to East Chester, Nova Scotia, to meet
officials who had been investigating the
scandal, authors who had been writing
about it and many U.S. adoptees who
survived the horrid conditions at the
Ideal Maternity Home. “It was the most
emotionally draining week of my life, but
also the most wonderful.”
“I drove to Portland, Maine, and took
the ferry to Yarborough, Nova Scotia. And I
was really nervous walking into the room
at the reunion, but I didn’t have to be. As
soon as I arrived I was grabbed and hugged
and welcomed — I got a blue name tag
noting I was a survivor and a bag of goodies like it really was a family reunion. It
wasn’t a sad place, it was joyous, with a DJ
and dancing, and Royal Canadian Legionnaires escorting us — turning something
horrible into a celebration.”
“I just wept when I
was there. Did I have
siblings? What led to
my being born there?
There are so many
things I will never
really know.”
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Later the visit turned more solemn, with
a trip to the spot where the home once
stood (it burned down in 1962), a look at
the big granite monument to the survivors
in front of the East Chester Community
Center (on the site of the former maternity
home) and a walk through the woods
where the graveyard may have been. “I just
wept when I was there. Did I have siblings?
What led to my being born there? There are
so many things I will never really know.”
Betsy recalls standing on the spot where
the maternity home foundation once was,
“with my hair standing on end, I was so
filled with emotion. It was almost too
much to handle.”
“But,” says Betsy, “for years I felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere, and now I know
why. Certainly, my mother and father raised
me with a lot of love, in a happy household,
but I felt there was always a piece missing, and
now I have it. I know where I was born.”
And now that she’s spent some time
digesting the emotional wallop of her Butterbox discovery and bonding with her
survivor family, Betsy is better able to put
the story in context.
“There probably won’t be another
reunion, because the organizer has passed
away. But I know I will go back to Chester
and try and find out more about my birth
family. There’s a rumor among the survivors that my birth father sent my birth
mother to France for my birth and then
she came back by boat to come to the
home to give me up for adoption. I’m
going to continue to search for information, consult Canadian genealogists, go
through old phone books and see what I
can come up with.”
“Of course, even what I know now has
been a gift. It’s brought me more joy than
sorrow, introduced me to worlds that
would never have been open to me. But
I’m going to keep looking!”
Meanwhile, if you hear about Lewes
Yacht Club’s Betsy Schmidt winning a sailing regatta or if you happen to see her
catching the wind and sailing across
Rehoboth or Delaware Bays, you and she
will both understand how her heritage
brought her to the Delaware coast to continue her love affair with the sea. n
Fay Jacobs, in addition to being a humor
columnist, has been both news and feature editor
for several weekly newspapers, had feature
stories published in national magazines, and is
currently feature editor for Letters from CAMP
Rehoboth.
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