Connelly v. Jones

Bond, O. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The ease is one on a petition for adoption of a child, resisted by the father, the mother being dead, and the father appeals from a decree for the adoption. There is very little dispute on the facts, the parties and witnesses on both sides having testified with apparently complete frankness. The' dispute is on the effect of the facts, and the action they demand, on the petition. ⁵⁴⁵ The child is a girl, bom April Gth, 1926, to Carroll Connelly and his wife, Ruth C. Connelly.

The couple had one other child, a son, born February 19th, 1924. The father is an iron worker living in Baltimore City, and, according to his testimony, was employed by the Bartlett-Hayward Company there until laid off in a reduction of the force of employees for economic reasons in January, 1932. Since that time he has obtained only odd jobs, and has been dependent in part, for support of his son and himself, upon the Catholic charities. While he expresses a hope of procuring employment soon, he frankly says he is not able to maintain a home now.

In June of 1929, the mother of the child became ill, and in need of an operation, and was required to go to a hospital, and she then took the girl child to an aunt of her own, or grand aunt of the child, Mrs. Jones, the appellee, of Queen Anne’s County. Mrs. Jones is a woman of fifty-one years, and her husband is sixty-three years old. She maintains a boarding house, with fifteen or twenty boarders, and her husband is an oysterman in season, and does odd jobs out of season. The testimony all agrees that the house is a good one for a child, and the child’s father declares that the aunt’s treatment of the child and of himself could not be better.

The mother of the child never came back for it. After her operation, she required confinement for nervous trouble, and she died at the Spring Grove Hospital for the Insane on August 15th, 1932. Since the child has been in the care of the grand aunt, its father has visited it only infrequently, staying from Saturday night until Sunday night when he did