"The Home" Tuam

Hi

My mother was born in tuam mother & child home in 1947. She did not have a birth cert until a few years ago. She only had a copy of her baptismal cert. in 1998 when i called the dioceses for a new copy, it revealed additional information that was not documented on the one my mother had, Her mothers address.
I can't remember exactly, I think I called Bernardo's in Roscommon who gave me the i.d number of the birth cert and told me it was with the registration of births marriages and deaths in Galway City.
Hope this might be of some help

I just listened to the BBC Radio Foyle interview with Catherine Corless.

Very moving and it shows how powerful local history / genealogy research can be.

Deleted User wrote: »

The Daily Mail headline is a disgrace - but coming from them - not a surprise.

Every rural cemetery a mass grave - if the definition is repeated burials in the same place and no headstones. As a child I often saw family graves opened and heaps of bones placed to one side, to be placed back on top of the coffin before the grave was filled.


Infant mortality before antibiotics was enormous - my grandmother lost four children to childhood illnesses. My mother barely survived pneumonia, I was a regular customer of the Bons Secours sisters in the fifties and I would'nt have survived with them and penicillin.

I was a boarder in a diocesan seminary in the early 60's. You could'nt heat the place in the winter so cold was normal. Dinner was mostly cheap bacon, cabbage and potatoes. This sounds like mis-treatment - but there were thousands of families living on bread and potatoes, dressed in tatters and kids coming to school barefoot.



Homes for un-married mothers appeared in the late 1700's - the first were founded by Protestant ladies to "save poor girls from destitution and destruction" - read that as being prostitutes. In other words, they were an improvement on the alternatives.

Yes the clergy preached continuously against the temptations of the flesh - I was well into my teens before I really knew how this might happen. It was a social necessity and they did'nt have to preach about the other six deadly sins, because there was little opportunity to indulge in them.

In my view, the Catholic clergy played a huge role in lifting the population out of poverty, ill-health and lack of education. They literally worked for their keep and nothing else. The nuns, who lived entirely in convents gave the most.

This was they way things were and trying to scapegoat the surviving elderly nuns is shameful.


John

Are these the type of nuns you are trying to defend?

Published by The Irish Examiner, a respected national Irish newspaper.


Women who gave birth at the notorious Bessborough mother-and-baby home in Cork were not allowed pain relief during labour or stitches after birth, and when they developed abscesses from breast-feeding they were denied penicillin.

One nun who ran the labour ward in 1951 also forbid any “moaning or screaming” during childbirth. Girls in poverty, who could not afford to make donations to the Sacred Heart order, had to spend another three years after their babies were born cleaning and working on the lands around the Cork city home to ‘make amends’ for their pregnancy.

Such work often included cutting the home’s “immaculate lawns” on their hands and knees — with a pair of scissors.

Before they left the home, their three-year-olds, with whom they would have established a strong emotional bond, were removed from them and fostered, put up for adoption, or sent to an orphanage — often with only hours’ notice.

These revelations were all made by June Goulding, a midwife who worked at the mother and baby home for a year from 1951, in her book The Light in the Window.

“I could not imagine why the babies were not placed in care immediately after the birth to avoid trauma on both sides” Ms Goulding wrote.

In the memoir, published in 1998, she recounts how, at her first Bessborough birth, she asked someone at the hospital what painkillers were used in labour.

“Nobody gets any here, nurse, They just have to suffer,” she was told.

Just like in the Magdalene laundries, none of the women were allowed to talk to one another or to nurses at the home. They were also expected to wet-nurse other women’s babies.

When Ms Goulding asked why she could not access needles to stitch women who had been torn during childbirth, she was told she was not allowed to open the cabinet. “I’m afraid, nurse, the key to that cabinet has never been handed over. Girls must suffer their pain and put up with the pain of being torn — she [the nun] says they should atone for their sin.”

Goulding described the home in Blackrock, Cork City, as “a secret penitential jail”. She had grown up less than three miles from the home but had been blithely unaware of how approximate 320 pregnant women and new mothers were treated by the nuns.

Standard practice at the time, according to the newly trained midwife, would have been to administer aspirin and penicillin to ease the pain and infection. At Bessborough, the women were given nothing.

Ms Goulding’s book is heartbreaking, revealing how many of the girls cried themselves to sleep every night. Only those from moneyed families who could afford to pay £100 were allowed to leave after 10 days, but many had nowhere to got.

“Having a baby out of wedlock was such a taboo subject at the time that often these [rich] women did not even tell their husband that their daughter was pregnant,” wrote Ms Goulding, who was tormented at the injustice of making young mothers suffer when their babies’ fathers were never taken to task by society.

Then again, she said, most of the fathers did not know if a woman was pregnant, as it would have “been too shameful” for the women to tell them.

© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved

Shame on you.

nootroc wrote: »

I think this thread should be kept for people trying to find out specific information if possible. Just a suggestion.

very true.