I'd like to ask your opinions about what effects certain childhood events might have had on a water rabbit?  (This is in the interests of developing an understanding of this person's personality.)

This person was the eldest child in a large family of seven siblings.  (This was sometime in the 1910s, 1920s...)

At first, they lived on a farm.  His father may have been an alcoholic, but indications are he had an essentially positive relationship with the man.  However, other hints suggest his father and mother probably had a bad relationship, and that his mother was domineering.  

Then his father died.  His mother suddenly decides she can't afford to feed all the children she has, so she sends him off to an orphanage.  She justifies it because he is the oldest.

Yet, she didn't send any other children to the orphanage.  Did sending just one off really save that much money?  Or does this suggest something else?

Could there have been a conflict between he and his mother over his father?  Did he do something bad?  Was she specifically singling him out for punishment or abandonment?

What impact did this abandonment have on him -- again, considering the fact that he was a Water Rabbit with a Dragon ascendant, and the eldest child?