Not every family out west was the one someone started with. The documented history of found family on the frontier, orphan trains, practical remarriage, and whole communities stepping in is more remarkable than most of what fiction invents.

Between 1854 and 1929, approximately 100,000 to 250,000 children rode what became known as the orphan trains west. Historians still argue over the exact number, which tells you something about how informal the whole system really was. Kansas alone took in roughly 7,000 of them. An 1888 placement circular laid out the arrangement in strikingly blunt terms. Families paid $50 to $150 depending on the child’s age, agreed to a trial period, and that was that. Children were literally displayed on train platforms for prospective families to look over, and at least one child was told, matter-of-factly, “you’re going to Texas, no use arguing.” Two of those orphan train riders went on to become state governors, which is either an inspiring footnote or a fairly savage plot twist depending on how you look at it.

Marriage worked in a similarly practical, occasionally hilarious direction. Companies like Matrimonial News built entire businesses matching frontier bachelors with women back east, a real, if quietly astonishing, industry built on the frontier’s badly lopsided gender ratio. My favorite documented case, a bride once boarded her stagecoach to meet her intended, was robbed en route, and later recognized her own robber as the very man she was engaged to marry. History does not record how that conversation went.

Communities filled in the rest. With no other family nearby, neighbors regularly took in children after an accident, illness, or a death in childbirth, not out of obligation exactly, but because that’s simply what a frontier town did for its own. It’s part of why found family shows up in this genre so often that it wasn’t a trope invented for fiction; it’s just what people actually did.

Has a found-family story ever hit you harder than a traditional one? Tell me about it.