"The Home" Tuam

heidiresk wrote: »

I am looking for any information anyone has on "The Home" in Tuam.
It was a mother and baby home in the old Tuam Workhouse on Dublin Road.

Hi

Just started researching 'The Home' Tuam. This institution was run by The Bon Secours Nuns and information can be traced (Or so I'm told) through The Bon Secours Hospital. Renmore. Galway. Phone 0035391381900. Also information is available throught the following:

<snip>


Good luck with your search!!!!!

Sorry to contacting you so later after your post, can you let me know if you got very far with your research, I'm looking into this for my mum and she was there in the 1958.

heidiresk wrote: »

I have just sent a letter to the contact you mentioned. Thank you for the information.

I had been referred to the Bon Secours on College Road in Cork and they were unable to provide me with any information.

I did receive very, very limited information from the Western Health Board.

Please let me know how you make out with your research. Thank you.

Hi. Try the following as they are officially sanctioned by the Government. They provide a tracing service and the institutions tend to be more giving in their information to them. I know of a former resident that ended up working in The Bon Secour Laundry (Paid or unpaid, not sure.) in Glasnevin Dublin.) Keep me posted.

A: Barnardos, Hyde Square, 654 Sth. Circular Rd. Dublin 8
T: 01 453 0355 (for residents abroad, please call +353 1 453 0355)
E: origins@barnardos.ie

Hi,

Thanks for the information I'll try them and see if they can help in my quest (trying to get information out of authorities that don't want to give it to you is hard). Many thanks again.

Thanks for all your help and info, got a birth cert. mum had the wrong date it was 1960 not 1958 (memories buried deep in her head) now for the hard work to try and trace him.

Thanks again

heidiresk wrote: »

I am looking for an online article referencing Mother Hortense (home manager) and the children ... I will post it when I find it.

I believe the children DID attend a school/class at the age of 4 or 5, so your mother's recollection may be correct.

Here is a link for Sacred Heart Mother/Baby
http://www.adoptionrightsalliance.com/castlepollard.htm

I hope that helps:)

The Grove was a Hospital. When the home was closed the children were transfered to other homes
around the country as far as i know.

heidiresk wrote: »

Hello,
I was in Ireland this past September and went to the site. However, I am not sure it would be the same place you are looking for. At some point the place on Dublin Road, (the old workhouse) was demolished and the children were in another facility at some point it became "the Grove" there is a FB site on it.
There is information in the Tuam Library regarding the facility, and I obtained a copy of the baptismal cert from the church. Bon Secours ran it when my mom was there and they did not keep the records, they were sent to the Western Health Board in Galway. The information they gave me was minimal. I am going to try this next address, recently posted.
Good Luck!!

btw - where was your mom then transferred to? They only kept the children for 4 or 5 years, it was considered an "infants orphanage"

has anyone got any info on the home in tuam ,? I am searching for my brother who was "adopted out"? from there at the age of 4...i got his birth cert but wouldnt know if he was given a new name ? Anyone help please

hi,
i grew up next to the home , remember it well, my grandfather worked in it. if you would like to know more let me know, ado

hi nanaanna,
some of the girls still call to us, the only link now they have with their past. some got work in the grove( hospital )after the home closed. this wasn't a new thing, if they signed up to work in the home it got better treatment for their children. some of the children did really well in life and got good jobs ,
whereabouts are you based?

Can you contact me at <snip> I may be able to help.

carol11 wrote: »

has anyone got any info on the home in tuam ,? I am searching for my brother who was "adopted out"? from there at the age of 4...i got his birth cert but wouldnt know if he was given a new name ? Anyone help please

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.