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Orphan Train Heritage Society
The Alice Lewis / Generosa Forquer Story
In 1915, a small four year old girl was placed with a childless Catholic couple in Tulsa, OK. The young couple presented a numbered tag to the agent who accompanied the child and were given the girl who bore the matching number on a tag pinned to her dress.
That couple, Eugene Dewey and Catherine Forquer took Alice Lewis home with them that day but, from the beginning, Alice knew that her ‘new’ mother was disappointed at not receiving the boy she’d requested. Msgr. J.G. Heiring was in ckarge of “placing out” children from the Holy ftunily Cathedral at that time and boys, it ttems, were at a premium.
Alice soon discovered that her foster father was not in the least disappointed and took solace in quickly becoming “daddy’s girl.”
ORPHAN STORY
That little girl is the present Mrs. E. F. Sell-man, of Tulsa, (nee Alice Lewis) bom in New York City in March of 1911, the youngest of six children, to Henry Lewis and Catherina Kennedy Lewis (her birth certificate when located had a spelling of Louis, but other records proved the correct spelling of the family name to be Lewis).
After being taken into the Forquer home,
Alice was given the name Generosa Forquer and didn’t actively pursue information about her birth family until the mid-50s, after the death of her foster father. After much correspondence with the Children’s Placement Services; City of New York, Department of Welfare; the New York Foundling Hospital, Our Lady of Victory Academy, New York; the Institute of Mercy, Tarry town, NY; and St. Joseph’s Hospital for Chest Diseases (the hospital where Henry Lewis died), the threads of her life began to come together.
The information gathered from all of these sources tell a story, not uncommon, but one that occurred all too frequently before aid was available to single parents. Of the six children, Alice (Generosa) was placed in the New York Foundling Home in 1912 three months prior to her father’s death. He was ill for quite some time, and it appears that her mother was unable to cope with his dying and the care of six children, the oldest of which was no more than 10 years old. Sisters, Marie and Kate, ages three and four were committed to the Our Lady of Victory, Tarrytown, NY; Daniel, six, and Martha, nine,
went to their paternal grandmother while Helen, the oldest, lived with a maternal aunt in the Bronx.
Mrs. Sellman to this day has never heard from any of her brothers or sisters, and when she found out that her mother, Catherina Lewis remarried a man named Abraham and reunited her family, she never understood why no one had tried to find her. She was never legally adopted and could have been reclaimed to rejoin her sisters and brother.
Raised in a good Catholic home, Mrs. Selman married and raised a large family of her own.
She shares the love of many children and grandchildren, but there will always be a small void in the part of her heart that asks the question: “Why didn’t anyone ever try to find me?”
Alice Lewis / Generosa Forquer, now Mrs. Alice Sellman
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