I recall that E. Wayne Carp was writting a book two or three decades ago
on the history of adoption in the United States, and I am pretty sure
that I recall him saying once that adoption as we conceive of it was a
late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century legal innovation that
created a very different kind of formal legal (as well as personal and
family) relationship between the person adopted and the people adopting.
It's worth looking into the legal evolution of adoption, which may
suggest ways in which at earlier times different kinds of in loco
parentis operated and when it changed.
 
 Sorry, I don't have a title for Carp's book.
 
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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