The False Heir of Tacoma
A young woman's desperate scheme to secure her marriage leads to a surrogate child and a city-wide scandal.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Recently, a notice appeared in the brevity columns of a Tacoma paper announcing the birth of a son to Mr. and Mrs. C. F. Criswell of St. Helens Avenue. However, the baby was not born to them; it was obtained from the Washington Children’s Home in Seattle and smuggled into the Criswell home to be presented as their own. The nurse, Mrs. Gregory, had facilitated the adoption. When the Reverend Dr. Brown, head of the home, grew suspicious and investigated, the couple initially claimed they had moved to Portland. Eventually, the child was reclaimed. The motive for the deception was the wife’s fear that her husband would leave her after discovering she was not receiving a $10,000 settlement from a railroad accident that killed her first husband. Despite the discovery of the ruse and the worthless legal claim, Mr. Criswell chose to forgive his wife.
“She was a widow, her first husband having been killed in a wreck on the Southern Pacific. She sued the railroad for $10,000, and when she married Criswell she thought her prospects for receiving the money were very bright.”
This story reveals the intense social and economic precarity of widows in the early 20th century, where a woman’s security was often tied to her marital status and her perceived fertility. The 'baby snatching' narrative, while sensationalized by the press, highlights the deep desperation often hidden behind the domestic facade of the era.
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