Caring, Compassion, and Clemency Within the Nineteenth-Century Foster Family of Clementeoffs; A Case of Fictive Kinship

In the traditional Western Christian family model, a nuclear family has a father, a mother, and their children. This has often been seen as an essential and ideal unit for child rearing, socialisation, and survival in general. However, this is not the structure of all families. Like today, families in the past were not as simple and not all of them were based on blood relations or marriage. Some social bonds that are formed by caring, compassion, and even clemency, were more complicated. In early nineteenth-century Finland, the Clementeoffs was such a family. This chapter aims to bring light to the case of this foster family.