17/03/2023
A "mother" sells her 4 children to escape poverty in 1948. She was pregnant when she sold her kids and later also sold the unborn baby.
The Story Behind the Picture:
This picture was taken August 4, 1948, and published in a Chicago newspaper.
It shows 4 young children: SueEllen (top left), Lana (top right), Milton (bottom left), and Rae (bottom right).
The mother, Lucille Chalifoux, was shielding her eyes from the camera, not sobbing as I first thought, according to the newspaper reports from the time, but then how do we really know. She was 24, married to an unemployed man 16 years older, and pregnant with her fifth child in six years at the time of the photo. Who’s to judge her true feelings?
After the picture appeared in papers throughout the US, offers of jobs, homes and financial assistance poured in for this family.
What Happened Next
No one knows how long the sign stood in the yard. Apparently shortly thereafter the father abandoned the family, and records show he had a criminal record. Lucille went on governmental assistance. A fifth child, David, was born in 1949.
The storyline is not complete, but David was either removed from the home or relinquished in July 1950. He was covered in bed bug bites and in rough shape. He was adopted by a loving but strict home and ran away at 16, spent 20 years in the military, and has been a truck driver ever since.
Rae says that she was “sold for $2 [in Aug. 1950] so her mother could have bingo money and because the man her mother was dating did not want anything to do with the children.” Milton was standing nearby crying, so that family took him too. Sadly, their new father was horribly abusive. Rae ran away at 17. Milton was removed from the home due to abuse (unclear at what age) and eventually ended up in a mental hospital diagnosed with “schizophrenia and having fits of rage”. He was released in 1967 at age 23. He eventually married, moved to Arizona, and is now divorced.
No one knows what happened to Lana, other than she died of cancer in 1998. SueEllen was adopted, but I’ve not been able to find out any additional information other than she had two sons. She told her children that she was sold by her mother.
What the Kids Have to Say:
SueEllen: Dying of lung disease said, “[My mother] needs to be in hell burning.”
Milton: “My birth mother, she never did love me. She didn’t apologize for selling me. She hated me so much that she didn’t care.”
David: “[Our mother] got rid of all us children, married someone else, had four more daughters. She kept them. She didn’t keep us. … We’re all human beings. We all make mistakes. She could’ve been thinking about the children. Didn’t want them to die.”
