John and Sarah Makin
While I so often find the long ago stories interesting, as in "The Bloody Benders" or the trial of Leopold and Loeb, they are also difficult to get all the true information. It is often like playing telephone from a time prior to secure records, newspapers and especially the Internet. It is often hard to distinguish the difference between fact and fiction. The case of John and Sarah Makin is just one of those stories. The Makin's resided in Australia in the late 1800's. During that time, as well as continued well into the 20th century, when an unwed woman became pregnant there was the stigma that shame would be brought not just to her and her family but to the child as well. A practice was started called "Baby Minding." In essence what generally happened is that an unwed mother would seek out a baby minder to care for her child for a fee. Sometimes the mother, and sometimes the father was involved too, would make agreements to continue seeing the ch...