Updated September 16, 2025 at 11:45 AM EDT
TUAM, Ireland — Anna Corrigan thought she was an only child.
It wasn't until she was in her 50s, researching her family tree, that she discovered a family secret: Corrigan found documents showing her mother, Bridget Dolan, had given birth to two boys in 1946 and 1950, in a home for unwed mothers.
It was an era when the Roman Catholic Church dominated Irish life. There was no sex education. Birth control and abortion were illegal, and pregnancy outside marriage brought shame.
Dolan died in 2001 without ever speaking about her sons.
"I never knew what she was going through," says Corrigan, 69, paging through black-and-white photos of her First Communion. "See the grip my mother has holding me? What was going through her mind, after losing two children? [Were they] taken away, dead, adopted?"
Throughout the 20th century, the Irish government and Catholic Church ran facilities called mother and baby homes, where single women who got pregnant could go to give birth. Mothers typically stayed about a year, while breastfeeding, but were then forced out — without their babies. These were similar to Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run, all-female workhouses where women who were considered disgraced often lived indefinitely, doing unpaid or underpaid labor, usually as laundresses.
The last Magdalene Laundry operated in central Dublin until 1996; the last mother and baby home closed two years later. Tens of thousands of women passed through these facilities. Many of their children never came out.
Only now, as the Catholic Church's influence wanes and Ireland grows more secular — voting in 2015 to legalize same-sex marriage and abortion in 2018 — and as genetic testing goes mainstream, are families investigating their links to this dark chapter of Irish history.
Corrigan's search for her missing siblings has taken her to a muddy field in the western Irish town of Tuam, in County Galway, where a mother and baby home was demolished in the mid-1970s. It operated from 1925 to 1961, run by a Catholic order of nuns called the Sisters of Bon Secours.
In the mid-1970s, two neighborhood boys were playing on the grounds of the Tuam home, when they fell down a hole into a disused septic tank. To their horror, they discovered the tank was lined with tiny human skeletons — and the fate of some of Ireland's missing children became known.
But it would take decades for anyone to investigate how many babies were buried in Tuam, and even longer — until this past July — for anyone to unearth them.
What life was like inside Ireland's mother and baby homes
A stone wall still runs along what was once the perimeter of Tuam's mother and baby home.
"It was a prison. If you looked out, all you saw was a high wall all around," recalls P.J. Haverty, 73, who was born inside and still lives down the road. "I feel like our brains didn't develop in there."
Ireland was relatively poor through most of the 20th century, and conditions in the mother and baby homes were meager. Food, sanitation and medical care were often inadequate, and nuns did not prioritize better care for these marginalized children.
During parts of the 1930s and 1940s, more than 40% of children in these institutions did not live past their 1st birthday, a government report later found. Overall, about 15% of children in Ireland's mother and baby homes died, mostly of disease, malnutrition and neglect, the report says. There was no evidence of any deliberate killing.
"Measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, and some of them had boils all over the body," says Catherine Corless, a 71-year-old amateur historian who first uncovered death records for hundreds of infants and children who'd lived in the Tuam home. "There were a lot of children in Ireland [who] at the time, before penicillin, were dying. But this home had a rate of four times higher than the death rate of children and infants in Ireland of those diseases."
Haverty doesn't remember conditions inside the home. Perhaps he blocked out the trauma, he says. His earliest memories are only of that stone wall, and of being segregated from other children in his primary school classroom. The first time he received any tenderness or affection, he recalls, was just before his 7th birthday, when a woman who would become his foster mother held his hand and led him away from the home.
Discrimination continued for most of his life, he says.
"Because you were born out of wedlock, you were different. One man told me I was dirt from the street, that I was a disease carrier," Haverty, now a grandfather, recalls. "When I got older and started going to the pub, there were elderly people who would switch seats, so they wouldn't have to sit alongside you."
A rare reunion between mother and son
After her son was born, Haverty's birth mother was sent to live in a separate wing of the Tuam home, while the nuns oversaw his care. She was allowed to visit him several times daily, only to breastfeed. Twelve months later, she was forced to leave without him.
Decades later, Haverty found letters she'd written to the Bon Secours Sisters, begging for custody. He also found the nuns' response, refusing her request and asking for money for his care.
Most children, if they survived infancy in the Tuam home, were fostered out or adopted before their 10th birthdays. Many grew up knowing little about their origins.
"I knew I was born in Tuam, but I didn't know anything else. I didn't know [until decades later that] it was at a mother and baby home," says Carmel Smyth Larkin, 76, who left as a toddler and still lives near the home. "My foster parents didn't ask, or they weren't allowed to. The church was so powerful! You didn't question."
After Haverty was fostered out to a family living on a farm outside town — where he says he had a happy upbringing — he had a brief encounter with a woman he would later learn was his birth mother, Eileen Haverty.
It happened when he was corralling cows on a road near the farm one day. He must have been around 12, he estimates. A car pulled up alongside him, and a woman asked for directions. Young Haverty pointed her in the right direction, and the car moved slowly alongside him for a bit.
"The lady in the passenger seat … as we were walking along, the smile and the looking she was doing at me, I got scared! 'Cause I thought then, did I [mistakenly] let the cows out in front of them?" Haverty recalls, laughing.
The encounter wasn't a coincidence. Eileen Haverty had received a tip from a former neighbor about where her son's foster family lived. She'd asked the local priest to arrange a meeting, P.J. Haverty says, but the priest refused and threatened her to stay away from her son and his foster family, warning that she would "only confuse him." Eileen, undeterred, drove past their house often, looking for her son, and finally saw him that day corralling the cows.
Years later, former neighbors connected them, and Eileen Haverty was able to reveal to her son that she was indeed the woman in the car that day. They reunited in 1977, when P.J. Haverty was 25. In photos of the two of them, sitting together on a sofa in London, they look strikingly similar — with the same wide smile.
Haverty visited Eileen several times in London, where she lived out her days and where she died in 2011. He was her only child.
Hundreds of other children, however, never came out of Tuam's mother and baby home.
Discovering and reburying tiny skulls in their gardens
Neighbors say there were rumors for years.
A woman named Ellen, who grew up near the site of the Tuam home after its buildings had been demolished, says everyone in the neighborhood has a story of finding "skulls and other remains" in their gardens. She didn't want to give her last name because of the shame she says the home has brought her and her community.
Ellen says she recalls her father and another neighbor simply reburying the bones. Neighbors would pray over the mass grave annually, she says.
"We always knew! Everybody knew it was consecrated ground," says Ellen, 41, who still lives across the street from her childhood home. "We were told when we went out to play, 'Do not go in the babies' graveyard. Stay out of the babies' graveyard.' And it was fine, we all knew what it was. You didn't go in, you respected it. We're Catholics. So you don't mess on consecrated ground."
Just how many infants were buried there, though, no one in town was ever quite sure — until Corless, the amateur historian, started investigating.
A former classmate always wondered what happened to those children
Corless grew up in Tuam and went to primary school with children born in the mother and baby home.
"I just vaguely remember them. They sat at the back of the class. They were skinny-looking, and they did have sores sometimes on their faces and hands," Corless recalls. "We were told not to go near them."
She too had long heard rumors about a mass grave. But unlike others, she decided to chase them up. In 2010, she began asking local officials, priests and the Sisters of Bon Secours about how many children died in their care.
"I had no idea what I was delving into. I was up against great opposition. The nuns said they know absolutely nothing. The authorities wouldn't let me see any records," she recalls. "But I got them eventually."
In 2012, she convinced a clerk at Tuam's town hall to search public records for anyone who died in the mother and baby home during its years of operation, from 1925 to 1961. She was expecting one or two a year, maybe. But the clerk said there were hundreds of death certificates.
"I got a cold shiver," Corless recalls.
The clerk printed out a list of 796 infants and children whose deaths were recorded in the facility. They range from newborns to 4-year-olds.
Corless published her findings later that year in an article headlined, simply, "The Home," in a local history journal. Irish media picked it up. Two years later, the Irish government ordered the creation of a national commission to investigate all of Ireland's mother and baby homes.
In 2017, the commission announced that preliminary excavations had found "significant quantities" of human remains at the Tuam site. The Irish Taoiseach, or prime minister, called the home a "chamber of horrors."
When NPR visited Corless in July at her farmhouse just outside Tuam, she unfurled that long printout of names and spread it across her kitchen table along with some of the official death certificates. She has also made a papier-mâché model of the sprawling facility where the children died. Before it became a mother and baby home, the complex was a British colonial-era poorhouse during Ireland's 19th century potato famine.
Corless gestures to where the facility's septic tank was. It became defunct in 1937, and that's when she believes the nuns started filling it with dead babies.
"They had to be lowered down into the tank, one on top of the other, the babies — probably lowered down on a sheet or something," she says. "They had no regard for those children, because they were 'illegitimate.'"
"They didn't bother to bring them to the cemetery across the road," Corless says. "It was a way of hiding, I suppose, all the death, all the babies that were dying."
Corless wins renown, and the nuns apologize
In 2018, in recognition of her work uncovering what happened to Tuam's children, Corless was named one of Ireland's People of the Year. The actor Liam Neeson is currently making a movie about her.
And in 2021, the Catholic order of nuns that ran the Tuam home, the Sisters of Bon Secours, issued an apology.
The order admitted it had played a role in a "sorrowful" chapter of Irish history "in which many women and children were rejected, silenced and excluded; in which they were subjected to hardship; and in which their inherent human dignity was disrespected, in life and in death."
"We did not live up to our Christianity," the nuns wrote.
On a 2018 visit to Ireland, Pope Francis denounced how Irish children were "robbed of their innocence and taken from their mothers" by Catholic-run institutions. He also met with Ireland's minister for children, and said her description of what happened in Tuam "still echoes in my ears."
A soaring dark stone church — the Cathedral Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary — still towers over Tuam. But weekday Masses are sparsely attended. When NPR visited in July, the priest saying Mass was from India.
White-haired ladies in raincoats chatted in the church doorway after the service, but no one was willing to talk to a visiting reporter asking about the excavations taking place half a mile away, nor about any collective responsibility for what happened there.
"We don't know anything," they said in unison, smiling politely.
But a local nun — who didn't want to give her name because she's not authorized to speak for her Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy — says she thinks the clergy who were once in charge of the Tuam home have been treated unfairly by history.
"There's a lot of misinformation. These children [in Tuam's mother and baby home] were very well cared for, as best they could! [The nuns] didn't have the resources," she says. "Today people would say children have too much."
The children who died in Tuam had virtually nothing.
Excavations began in Tuam this summer
The septic tank where hundreds of them are believed to be interred has since flooded several times over the decades. So unearthing the remains, matching their bones and identifying them is an arduous, delicate — and horrifying — task.
It's being led by Daniel MacSweeney, a forensics expert who previously worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Yemen. Workers first used ground-penetrating radar in 2014 to locate evidence of remains and later traced them to the septic tank, where they began digging in small test areas.
On July 14, widescale excavations began in earnest, using bulldozers and digging machines. Baby bottles and tiny shoes have since been found mixed in with fragments of tiny skeletons.
Excavations are expected to last at least two years, MacSweeney's office says. After that, forensics experts will begin analyzing and identifying the remains.
Meanwhile, townspeople in Tuam and farther afield are giving DNA samples to Irish authorities working with MacSweeney's team, to determine whether some of the babies belonged to them or their relatives. Some families have said if there's a match, they'll apply for custody of the remains and arrange private reburials.
Corrigan is still searching for her missing brothers
Among those who've given DNA samples is Anna Corrigan — the Dubliner who thought she was an only child and is now searching for two brothers. She has located both of her brothers' birth certificates, but only one death certificate.
Her eldest brother John Dolan's birth certificate shows he weighed 9 pounds when he born in the Tuam home in 1946. A year and a half later, his death certificate lists his causes of death as measles and "congenital idiot," an outdated, derogatory phrase for mental disabilities, though there was no previous mention of Corrigan's brother having any.
"What does that even mean?" Corrigan asks. "Born at 9 pounds, that's a very healthy baby! But then I found a report from a year later that said he was emaciated, with a voracious appetite. And then he's dead four months after that, and he's a 'congenital idiot'?"
Her other brother, William Joseph Dolan, born at the Tuam home in 1950, is listed on the home's internal ledgers as having died in February 1951. But there's no cause of death, no medical certification of death and no death certificate. His date of birth is also crossed out and changed by three years. And he's not on Corless' printout of 796 children who died in the Tuam home.
"So are they digging for him, in those excavations?" Corrigan asks.
She thinks — hopes — he may still be alive. Corrigan believes her brother may have been sent to the United States for adoption, like thousands of Irish babies from the same era.
Adoption wasn't legal in Ireland until 1953. Before that, adoptions still happened, but they were private, informal, often arranged by nuns discreetly — and unlawfully. Money often changed hands.
That may have been why Corrigan's brother's birthdate was changed, she believes.
If he is alive, she doubts his name is still William Dolan. The nuns or an adoptive family would likely have changed it. But through DNA testing, biological relatives are now indeed finding each other.
And that's been the case in this NPR reporter's own extended family.
The tip of the iceberg
In the course of reporting this story, I discovered that one of my own cousins — adopted nearly six decades ago by my grandmother's sister and her husband, in New Jersey — came from a mother and baby home not far from Tuam, in County Tipperary. Through DNA testing, she's found two biological sisters.
That home where she was born, called Sean Ross Abbey, operated until 1970. Public records show more than 1,000 children died there. No excavations have been done yet.
Tuam is the first of Ireland's mother and baby homes to be excavated for remains. On the day digging began, Corrigan stood on the edge of the mass grave, musing about her lost brothers.
"Tuam is the tip of the iceberg," she says, "and a lot more's to come."
NPR producer Fatima Al-Kassab contributed to this story.
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