A note before I begin this piece. The adoptee in this case has allowed me to write this piece, but has asked that the names and locations for those involved be changed. So, any location and name you see mentioned has been altered. But, the story and way this played out, is very, very real. For this piece, the adoptee here, will be called Celine.

On March 30th, I was on the 96fm Opinion Line Show with PJ Coogan. I was invited to speak about my research into mother and baby homes & Project Infant. It was the first interview that I had done in some time. [If you missed it and want to catch up with the interview, you can watch it below.]

I had thanked the radio team for bringing me on for the interview and then subsequently hung up. Having hardly gotten off the line, I got a message from the radio team — they got a call from someone wanting to speak to me and had passed on the name and number for this person. Their name was Celine and they were born in Bessborough House, Cork - a mother and baby home which operated between 1921 to 1998. I rang the number and spoke to Celine, who sounded defeated, almost like this had been a last ditch attempt to see if there could be anything that could be found about her past. Before I got off the phone with her, she said “I’m sorry for dragging you into wanting to know who I am.“. It caught me off guard as this seemed to be a mindset which she had been in for some time - which made me even more determined to help. I had arranged to meet her at her home in the first week of April as she was not able to travel long distances.

I went to Celine’s home and met her for the first time. She is in her mid-70s and we sat down and she told me about her short journey and how it had been quite difficult for them to find anything about her birth family. She had limited information. Celine had been adopted by an older couple in County Limerick named Mr. and Mrs. Bowden. The only document that she had was the birth record under her adopted name. She had gone to Bessborough later in life in an attempt to find more information about herself. She had met with a nun from Bessborough who checked their registers and had told her the name of a child who was born on her birthday. The name of the child that the nun gave her was Celine Mulvaney, born to Ivy Rose Mulvaney of County Monaghan. There was only one child born on that day, so it gave Celine a starting point, which she had told me about.

From there, the first priority was for Celine to get all of her information from Bessborough. They weren’t aware of any legislation or means of getting information. She felt that she had left it too late to find any information, and had just sounded defeated. It hurt seeing someone impacted by mother and baby homes feel like there was no way of finding information about themselves. I printed out two forms in advance, which I helped Celine to fill in. One was for the Birth Information & Tracing Act and the other was a Subject Access Request to the Department of Children. It laid the framework of the discoveries that were yet to come. We had posted it the same day that she filled it in. One other thing I suggested to Celine was for her to take a DNA test (in this case, I went for one from Ancestry), which she had agreed to do. A few days later, I chose to do something that I don’t usually do, and I bought one on her behalf - as I know she would not have been in a position to buy it. I had arranged to meet her again, but with a DNA test in tow. We registered her DNA kit, she gave her sample and I posted it off for her, eagerly awaiting any new answers. She would phone me every so often to check in and ask about the process, what to expect, what things meant - that sort of thing. Most importantly, little by little, she had sounded more and more hopeful and cheerier - that she may get an answer in all of this. Far from how Celine was the first time I’d met her. It had taken 2 weeks to return, once I got Celine’s results back, that is when I started delving into her matches.

Having clustered her matches, I worked out which side was the mother’s side, the Mulvaneys and her father’s side, the Snyders. I began to build a family tree of her matches, building a hypothesis. I managed to identify the family where Celine’s father was from. For Celine’s mother’s side, the matches which were appearing had greatly helped to confirm that Celine’s original name was Celine Mulvaney, that she was Ivy’s daughter. Knowing that Ivy was the route we were needing to pursue, I traced Ivy through records, documenting the research in a tree. Ivy had married a few years after having Celine and had one child that I could identify. Once I got Ivy’s birth record, that was the turning point. When I added the information into a tree, I saw one tree hint. It was a small tree and only had five people in it. This was for a user named Pamela, who had an unusual surname, so once I had the name - I typed it into Facebook. Immediately, the first result which came up had changed everything.

Staring back at me was Ivy’s death notice. She had died a little over a month ago this year, in her mid-90s. Enclosed with it was a photo of Ivy. What struck me first was how Celine is the spitting image of Ivy. Then came the rest of it, Ivy had three children, not just one and had later remarried after the death of her first husband. One of them was Pamela, one of Celine’s half sisters. Fast forward a long weekend of searching, I prepared my findings for Celine. Yesterday, I met Celine who was in a happy mood - her files from one of her applications had arrived in the post. She had a little look at the files, but wanted me there to help her understand it. I sat down and walked through the findings I had slowly. Page by page, I showed her the first glimpse of her family history. She was happy to know all of this, but what really made it was seeing her reaction to the photo of her mother, Ivy. She kept looking at it and was in awe of it, repeatedly saying: “She’s beautiful…“ - looking at the face of her biological mother for the first time. When we went through the findings that I had made, we had looked at her files. What was even more rewarding was the putative father matched the theory I had identified using Celine’s DNA matches. From that, led me to find that Celine had three more half sisters, giving her six in total - three on each side.

Now, it’s a case of trying to trace her sisters to try and work to bridge a connection between Celine and her sisters. But, this has possibly been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done - seeing the happiness on Celine’s face, who now knows her original name and her family history was something to behold. After I had shared what I had found for her, she just kept wondering what would have happened if she never listened to the radio that day and heard me, would she have ever found anything?

Aside from that, there was a number of reasons I wanted to share this piece. For one, Celine’s case is one that highlights a number of continuing issues with the way the impact that mother and baby homes that has been left on survivors and their families is handled. One of the main things was the redress scheme. That is still subject to the 6 month rule. Celine had only spent three months in Bessborough, so she does not qualify for any kind of financial redress. My biggest gripe however was with the advertisement of measures like the Birth Information and Tracing Act & the Redress Scheme. Back at the ‘height’ of both of these avenues being advertised, I got tagged in more posts on Bluesky sending me photos of the advert for the Redress Scheme plastered on billboards on carriages of the London Underground than in Ireland itself. I had only ever seen one poster, which was not there for long at the Parnell Street Bus Station in Cork City. There was more of a priority placed on advertising on social media, which may work for a certain demographic, but not everybody. Nowadays, there is practically nothing said about either the Redress Scheme or the Birth Information & Tracing Act - leaving a lot of people in the dark, if they never caught the prior advertisements for whatever reason. Thankfully, when it comes to getting her files, it only took a month and a half to get them back. However, the images of different records that were in her files were very difficult to read, I had to transcribe a lot of it for Celine.

But perhaps the most important thing to take from this which I would urge you to consider, if you are in a similar situation, is no matter how old you are - it is not too late to begin searching, with Celine being in her 70s - please know that it is not too late for you.

It’s almost been five months since my last post here (oops). It’s been an interesting five months to say the least, not very smooth - just quite turbulent. [And I do promise to not just make my only posts here a ‘sorry I’ve not written here in a while, will try to do better in future’ apology piece - I do have other things in the works.]

But that’s slowly changing. However, it has taken a long way to get there though.

Back in November of last year, I’d hit my tipping point, I’d hit a low I didn’t know was possible mentally due to a number of contributing factors over the preceding months. It sent me into a complete slump, I had no desire or drive to do anything at all, genealogy or otherwise. I managed to calm myself down slightly the only way I knew how: by getting it out of my brain and onto ‘paper’ (or in my case, a social media post), but it was only temporary.

I had so much anxiety and a general ‘down-in-the-dumps’ feeling, it just wore me down, crippled me and had sent me spiralling over the edge. I shut down. I cried, had many existential crises, had a crap sleep schedule. I was incredibly grumpy and on-edge. It wasn’t pretty.

So, these past few months - I’ve been working on myself and ensuring I don’t keep up the same miserable way of life I’d known and done for years. Those who have followed along with me for some time will know I have been open about my mental health, for the hope that it would be of comfort to others to help them not think that they’re alone.

All of this isn’t a new thing for me either, it was just something I tried (and failed) to learn how to deal with for three years. I had tried numerous things to help with anxiety: coping mechanisms, the Calm / Headspace type apps, decreasing social media use - nothing worked.

However, by this point I was desperate. This had slowly swallowed me up gradually and the final straw was when it started affecting my love of genealogy and mother and baby homes research — my only escape from my brain. I so badly wanted to feel better and to just be happy. I started looking to see what supports were there from my university.

So, first came the initial talk therapy consultation. Sitting opposite a man with a laptop open taking down notes about everything I was telling him. I unpacked three years (and some) of stuff that clogged up my brain and just couldn’t get out. At the outset, I was told rather coldly “you need to change your thinking”. Now, I may have been reading too much into it at the time but I was put off by that remark. After revealing everything that I’d kept inside, I was hanging on by a thread, I was incredibly fragile. I had never done this kind of thing before and it was nothing short of a shock to my system. So, at that precise moment, telling me to do something I had already been trying to do for years - I had felt that it was a sign that this was already going to be quite pointless. I politely requested that I be put with another therapist, and things would be looking up afterwards — but after that initial consultation, I felt like I’d just ripped myself open and I knew there wasn’t any chance of going back.

Then the first GP visit rolled around, from that came the introduction of medication and conducting a number of blood tests to try and rule things out. A few appointments later and while things are still going, it’s looking like something along the lines of OCD. In the beginning, it didn’t compute with me and I was in denial. Surely, this couldn’t be it? I just thought, could I actually be getting an answer? Then things started to fit into place. For quite some time, I’d felt different to other people but I just never knew how to describe it and it had bothered me. A lot.

But, being on medication for a few months now — it does feel like the seas are less choppy now, a little bit of calm in the storm. Everything is still a work in progress but it’s going in the right direction.

Last week, I’d been to see my GP for another check-up, and they remarked saying “you look and sound much happier” and for the first time in a number of years, with my whole chest, I could finally say two words I truly meant:

“I am”.

Must be surprising to see my name pop up in your inbox again, right? I know. Turns out a 3 month hiatus was not in the grand plan of things for me, but that gap in my writing was not without advancements. I am happy to say there was a lot going on behind the scenes in the place of this. I’ll talk about these things in due course because something that has taken up a lot of my time is back and forth with officials, offices and departments - and I think if I talk about those things before I’ve got a resolution, I’ll end up jinxing it.

I’m back in the swing of things with University, adjusting to my new normal as both myself and my sister are in higher education now, I do subcontracting work now, I’ve got more written pieces due to come out in publications, presentations to make - it never stops!

But, I do have two pieces to finish writing for my Substack. One of which, I am still debating over whether to do it as a podcast episode or a blog post.

Which brings me to my next thing, my podcast will be returning. But, under a new name. At the moment, it’s called ‘The Irish Genealogy Podcast’. When it’s relaunched, it’ll be known as ‘The Research Reverie’.

So, you’re probably thinking, why the rebrand and name change?

Well, that stems from the purpose. When I started my podcast in December of 2021, I set out with the intention of making it a place of all things relating to Irish genealogy. But, things change, and so do I. When I launched Project Infant in July 2022, a mere 7 months later - I did find myself not wanting to repeat myself on subjects and it resulted in me starting to regret pigeon-holing myself into an individual subject, so it stayed neglected. I did do some episodes (Find a Grave, the #SaveOurWills campaign) that weren’t strictly Irish genealogy but had tried to tie it into that where possible, even if that was somewhat small.

Later on, I put more work into making videos for TikTok, and fortunately for me, my account got verified at the start of April which put my mind at rest for anyone who’d try to impersonate me - so I put a ton of effort into my content there, where I’d share my research there like a diary. However, while some things work on TikTok - not everything does. Some people enjoyed the longer kind, others would enjoy the shorter kind.

So, I’d often find people reaching out to me asking whether I had a podcast or not. It seemed to be something of interest to people. So, I started to look into rebranding and reviving it.

But, why that name? It came to me as a lightbulb idea. The same kind of lightbulb idea that resulted in Project Infant. They don’t strike me often, but when they do - it usually tends to be something good! The key word in the new name is ‘Reverie’. Reverie, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has two meanings, they are defined as:

Both of those definitions describe me whenever I do anything relating to genealogy research. By going for this name, you never know what it might be. It might be genealogy research, mother and baby homes, a fusion of the two, or something else entirely.

There’s still some things behind the scenes that are still being done, before it’ll be officially relaunched - but it’ll eventually return to the platforms you know and love. But between YouTube and a podcast, my heart leans towards a podcast more. (I’m not sure why, but I’m not questioning it.)

Now, Project Infant - oh, Project Infant. I am looking forward to seeing how that evolves. Below are the current totals of how many institutional deaths that we have recorded. I am so lucky to have the amazing volunteers (click here if you want to get involved!) who help me on a day to day basis to do the work that we do — to ensure that no name of any person who died in an institution is ever forgotten.

It is a fast moving time, I’m currently contemplating expanding the research scope once more. But, I’m assessing the practicality of it first! There’s some additional interactive areas of the website I’m working to develop more as well. It’s never a quiet time, I can assure you.

But, I’m happy above all else because I am right where I want to be. Thank you for your patience in waiting for me to grace your inbox again, but I’m hoping it won’t be long before the next one! As always, please consider subscribing to my Substack (it’s free, and it’s the one sure way I can guarantee you will hear about what I do) as whenever I am in the writing spirit, I let my ideas run loose here. Some, are out of the box, some might be obvious. But above all else, this outlet is cathartic for me whenever I need to rant or speak my mind. What you see (from my past posts) is the kind of stuff you’ll get.

Until next time…

What a surreal day. Thursday gone had marked a piece of news an entire country (and its diaspora) has been waiting to hear.

It has been announced that after 11 years since the story broke in the Daily Mail Online in June 2014 by Alison O’Reilly, that the Tuam excavation will begin on July 14th, with preparatory measures to be put in place for the dig, starting on June 16th, only next Monday - now a matter of days away.

This will be a first of its kind in Ireland’s history, and is on quite a large scale too. But, most importantly, it’s a significant milestone in the quest for answers for the families of the children and mothers who died in the institution itself.

It’s envisioned that the dig will take around 24 months to complete.

However, while many are pleased and focusing on the fact that we are finally on the quest for answers, my mind has shifted to a slightly different area. One important cornerstone of the excavation itself involves the identification of the remains through the use of DNA.

Some of this I had touched on in ‘Fadó fadó’, which you can read by clicking below.

I fear that there are some looming issues that were not considered when the Institutional Burials Act was being formulated and debated in the Dáil back in 2022. While I do not doubt the ability of Forensic Science Ireland [FSI] who are facilitating the identification of the remains, by any means — I do feel that the Act may end up harming and restricting the potential success of identifying the remains.

Some points to bear in mind with this Act:

• You have to be one of the specified relationships that have been recognised in the act as an eligible relative to be able to give a DNA sample to help the identification effort. These relationships are: a parent, child, sibling, half-sibling, grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew (whether of the whole blood or the half-blood), grandniece or grandnephew of the deceased.

• You have to ensure that your family members do not object to you providing a sample to the identification effort.

• You have to be able to prove how you are related to the deceased, provided you are one of the aforementioned relationships.

• They are not utilising any of the mainstream DNA databases that we know of and use on a daily basis like Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA etc… - they are creating their own one.

And I am worried about the impact of this legislation on the success of the Tuam exhumation. You see, as the current restrictions, I know of at least one child who won’t be identified because of the current restrictions.

She was born in early July 1941 to her mother Annie Roughneen. Annie was one of the 796 children who died in Tuam, she died on July 29th 1941 at the age of 3 weeks. Her mother, also named Annie died just over 2 weeks later after her on August 13th at the age of 42. They're recorded side by side.

I was testing a theory and had been researching Annie Sr's family history, she was part of a large family - but the size of the family in this case is irrelevant. Under the current regulations of the Act, there is no viable relationship to test DNA against to reunite her remains with her family. The allowed relationships that DNA will be taken from are [as above]: a parent, child, sibling, half-sibling, grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew (whether of the whole blood or the half-blood), grandniece or grandnephew of the deceased.

There is a slight issue with this. Annie Jr's grandparents had died in 1916 & 1928. Her mother is dead as she died two weeks after, as is the case for whoever her father was. Her aunts and uncles [born between c. 1886-1903] are dead. (Grand)niece or (grand)nephew? Forget that.

So, as it stands at the moment, no one will be able to identify Annie Jr. because of the restrictions. If they had allowed cousins, it would be possible. I discovered one of Annie's cousins died in late April of this year. However, as I had posted that on social media, a situation did occur in my mind, if Annie Sr’s nieces/nephews happen to come forward and give DNA, if Annie Sr. happens to be buried there and they can identify her, then they should be able to identify Annie Jr. with that. But then again, I thought, did they know they have a connection?

Now, I am friends with a lot of genealogists who do work in identifying John & Jane Does in the United States and the one thing I could not get out of my mind is the very possible likelihood of there being remains who aren’t identified because there was no relative who knew about them to be able to test against.

And why did I call this blog post ‘Boulevard of Bonkers Ideas’? Well, those who’ve followed me for a while will know the ideas I come up with can sometimes be a bit… unusual to say the least and there’s been plenty of my ideas which people would likely class as bonkers.

The idea I had come up with is to try and do what I can to make sure that doesn’t happen to any one of those children. My idea would be try to trace the families of those who died in Tuam and to let them know that they have a relative who died in Tuam and to illustrate to them how vital they would be in identifying the remains, that way at least the children would be identified, with no one left behind.

Although, at the same time, I could pretty much shoot the idea down myself. I’d end up needing the birth certificates for the children to get the mother’s names and try and trace the mothers back to wherever in Ireland they are from. [For Tuam, it’s predominantly Mayo & Galway, but there are a few exceptions] - which are €5 each. (which would be almost €4,000 if you’re doing the maths…)

It’s my gut telling me that since I can’t give my DNA to the identification effort (there are two babies from locales in my family tree on my Dad’s side that have surnames that feature in my family tree) that it would be my way of doing my bit, ensuring that it can happen for those who can give DNA, helping connect the relatives who might not be aware of how important they are in this, to the identification effort.

But one thing I do wish Ireland has is just a database that the public could contribute their DNA to, for operations like this — to help give these babies their identities and their dignity back. [Or even to identify the unidentified remains we have in Ireland anyway going back to 1968].

I know it’s still very early days with this yet, no shovel has hit the ground yet, but it’s just bugging me, and I don’t like how much it is bugging me. I suppose it’s the downside to being quite passionate about this subject and ensuring no one is forgotten.

You just want that to be the case for every other institution. For everybody to have dignity, an identity and justice.

Kindly note that some topics in this piece will discuss an infant death with some graphic distressing details.

Whenever I do my research, I make sure I can back up my facts, then I post about it. That’s my work ethos, my process. I make sure everyone is afforded the dignity of being remembered, their names spoken.

I post about my research in the hope that it’ll educate and inform others. However, that’s not to say there won’t be a few times when some finds will catch you off guard.

I had written about one particular find. On June 24th, 1954 in the Commodore Hotel, Cobh — an establishment that had been looking out upon the coast since the 1850s was listed as someone’s place of death.

When conducting research along with volunteers with Project Infant, I discovered the death cert of somebody who died there. It was that of an unidentified newborn baby boy. His place of death was given as ‘A wardrobe in Room 45, Commodore Hotel’.

There is not much known about the child apart from where he died & the manner in which he died. The cause was given as:

“Deceased was found dead in a wardrobe in room 45, Commodore Hotel on Thursday 24th June 1954. The cause of death was possibly strangulation apart from the foregoing owing to the brain having become lignified and the decomposition of the tissues of the face, there was nothing to show the absolute cause of death, and there was no food in the stomach or intestines. There was a cord tied around the neck which caused an ante-mortem groove on the skin.”

— Ruling of Edmond A. Rice, coroner for County Cork.

Outside of this death record and the following newspaper article, there is no other trace of this child.

It reads:

COBH INQUEST VERDICT

A verdict of possible strangulation was the verdict returned by a jury of which Mr. John Murphy was foreman at an inquest held by Coroner E. A. Rice, solicitor in Cobh yesterday on an unnamed male infant which had been found the previous evening.

It’s a very small mention but that’s all there is. A burial place has not been located either. Now, this was by no means a new find. I posted about it on Twitter last year.

So, why exactly am I mentioning this again? You see, it was a story I felt had to be shared more than once and not solely on one platform. I did a video about this child on TikTok. Only this time, I got a comment that surprised me. It had ended up being seen by somebody who used to work at the Commodore hotel.

The premise of the story is that we might have heard about some family story, or know of some local rumour that we might not initially believe / think is in any way true. But if this teaches you anything is that in many cases, that our local history does live on, and those rumours might actually have a sliver of truth to them, you just mightn’t spot it at first.

Firstly, thank you to every single one of you that attended my talks at RootsTech over the past few days. If you missed any of them, you can find them all here. Now that it has concluded and the anxiety of giving talks to such a large audience has subsided for me, it’s back to (semi-)regular programming for me.

After a while, I suspect I’ll start to sound like a broken record although I hope to write about a lot more before any of that happens. At the moment, the public is aware of the names for 887 children who had died in Bessborough. We’re still searching for 36 names. At this point, I am going through every detail of the Commission’s report to see if I can figure out who I am missing. However, that’s proving to be more difficult than I’d like at the moment. But one detail that did catch my eye was about one of the mothers.

She was a lady who had died in Bessborough in 1974 at the age of 81, spending time there since 1923. When Carmel and I had gone to the GRO in Roscommon last November, this was one of the people we had been searching for. We had an age, location and year - that was it. We weren’t able to find her there. (I did end up finding the missing name as the caretaker was able to assist me. Her name was Bridget O’Leary — she died on March 23rd, 1974 at the age of 81.)

I had known that there was a plot in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Ballyphehane, Cork, but didn’t know where it was. Thankfully, one kind caretaker showed me around and brought me to the Bessborough plot. This is the state of the plot which I was greeted with.

It looked messy and there are only two memorial markers, one of which is severely damaged. [As in split in half, damaged] The other one is a metal cross which bears incorrect information.

Admittedly, the first words out of my mouth to the caretaker were “Is that it?” as I had (naively) thought that there would be some semblance of a decent memorial because I know that there are nine individuals buried in that plot. The other 50, which I have burial records for, are in the ‘poor ground’, below is the image of one of the poor grounds in that cemetery.

Along the back wall are a line of headstones added by relatives of those buried in the poor ground at a later point. But what I find incredible (and not in a good way) about this plot that has nine people in it is that the grave owners didn’t seem to show much concern in memorialising them at all.

The two memorials on the plot I showed earlier belong to two mothers: Julia O’Donoghue and Ann Walsh. Julia died in 1984 and Ann died in 1985, both mothers spending over 60 years in Bessborough, making them the longest residents in the institution.

Julia’s plaque was pretty difficult to read, but Ann’s memorial cross bears her ‘house name’, which was Doris. So it doesn’t properly honour her memory (in my opinion).

A house name is a name given to a mother upon entering an institution to obscure her identity to others in the institution with them.

This is more information for some of the burials that 859 missing children don’t have the luxury of having. For 9 people, why wasn’t there even an attempt made to put a proper memorial on the plot? Not even adding a ‘cover all’ memorial with an inscription like ‘In memory of the Bessborough children buried here’? But the fact that they had stopped short of that, to me is quite telling.

So, while looking into seeing if there is any way of getting a memorial placed in that plot, [there may not be, but we may as well see, right?] — here are the names of the 5 mothers and 4 children who are buried in that plot.

Life is a roller coaster, but also a juggling act - you just don’t know how much you have to deal with until you start.

Being back at college and with several weeks to go until RootsTech (just a little over 2 weeks now!) — I’ve submitted my slides and syllabi for my two classes. Here is my speaker page. Click here to add my classes to your schedule.

Please note that I will not be in person at RootsTech. I’m giving both of my talks online (but still live!) from my desk here in Ireland.

I must admit, trying to juggle college and genealogy life (while also trying to progress on getting part-time work, which hasn’t been working very well for me as of late) - is certainly a challenge. But it’s certainly helped me to look at what I have to do [in this case, I see the plastic ball pit balls, as a load of tasks, regardless of whether they’re small or large]

Some things are always going to be a constant ongoing task. For instance, the three essays I have to do in three of my subjects. Or perhaps studying for a resit of a driving test I’ll eventually have (and hope to miracles that I pass…) I seem to manage to have everything happening at once, don’t I?

It’s a real pain for me sometimes, wanting to go down yet another research rabbit hole or just want to do research - but I have not been in the mood for doing any recently at all, which bugs me to no end. However, based on past experiences, I know not to force it because I definitely will be in no mood to do anything. What I will feel is guilt, that I’m not doing enough or that because I don’t have time to do any research (or I’m simply not in the research headspace) it’s going to set me back by weeks with what I want to achieve. Heck, I hardly write on this space because I don’t have the time. But I’m trying to prioritise this.

But perhaps one of the more important things that college has taught me (or at least reinforced for me, I should say) is planning and time management. I say that as if I’m to feasibly (and as I mentioned above, feel able to) do any sort of work with Project Infant and balance that with college and social life, I do have to plan to make sure everything gets a look in and prioritising the important bits [something that goes without saying!].

In genealogy, a similar principle to this could be used as well. When there is someone you mightn’t be making much headway with, pause, take a step back and re-evaluate what you’ve done. Then, go and focus on another part of your tree elsewhere.

Admittedly, I know this is a much shorter post than usual, but I just wanted to put out something to let people know I am still working on this. In other news, I’ve made a lot of headway on something that I have been researching for some time (that I’ve also written about on my blog here). That will probably be one of the longest blog posts that I have written to date! I’m even considering narrating the blog post, so if you would like to listen to it - you can hear the words in my voice instead of Substack’s own AI voice thingy.

(On another note) One thing I would like to know is what content from me you enjoy the most. I’m trying to work out what kind of content to focus on. YouTube? Blog? Podcast? TikToks? Something else? I’d appreciate it if you could let me know your thoughts!

* — names changed

When the Birth Information and Tracing Act was introduced in June 2022 - it was described as a groundbreaking piece of legislation — something like this had never been seen before. This Act aimed to introduce further ways for an adopted person, someone who was boarded out, or those who were the subject of an illegal birth registration to receive more information about themselves. One of the primary things the Act would provide was a means for people like my Mum to receive ‘early life information’ — meaning that my Mum would be allowed to gain access to information about a period of her life previously shrouded in mystery: when she was born.

But before this, trying to obtain any information would have been almost impossible - if you did get anything, it was a meaningless sliver.

Rolling back the clock to the late 1990s, my parents get married in a church in England. Mum had wanted to know if there was anything hereditary-wise she needed to know about before she had kids. She got a very short response back saying that there was nothing that she needed to worry about. At the turn of the millennium, she had written to the [St. John’s] adoption society where her adoption was facilitated, but she was rerouted to the Sacred Hearts Adoption Society. She had received a letter in August 2000, from a Sr. Sarto. It essentially went to the tune of:

Dear Mrs Loftus,

Thank you for your letter. We checked our records and can give you the following details.

You were born on [birth date] at [birth time], were a normal delivery, were full term and weighed [birth weight].

We do not have your adoption file here, please write to [person & address] for assistance.

— Sr. Sarto

Mum didn’t need to write to this other person as Mum inherited the files that her adopted mum, Kathleen had when she had died almost 6 years prior. So, for another 17 years — that is all that she had and would know about her origins. Until, a couple of days after my Mum’s birthday in November 2017 — she was contacted by Tusla to hear that she had a half-sister Rochelle*, looking for her.

That December, a social worker, who we will call AA had been assigned to my Mum & had sent my mum a one-page letter and gave my Mum a paraphrased summary of her files. Files about her birth, and time in Bessborough - got a bit more: when she was born, it was the first time the name ‘Bessborough’ had been mentioned and a very brief description of what Bessborough was. It got part of Mum’s birth name wrong which she would discover a year later when she received her original birth certificate, [which had to be released by a consent form signed by Ana* — who had no problem doing so neither Mum nor Ana* didn’t quite understand the need for it.] and talked about brief information about Ana’s* background. Additionally, it paraphrases a lot of correspondence between religious orders and Ana*, part of which was to ensure that Ana* was on top of her payments for Mum’s upkeep.

However, the one thing Mum would not have been able to see is the actual files AA had been examining and paraphrasing in that letter. No adoptee would ever be privileged to look at such documents.

October 3rd, 2022 — the date when BirthInfo.ie: the online portal for applying to get a copy of files about your early life information was launched. This had a massive backlog (and still does, from what I have seen as of late) when it was launched and as such, Mum hadn’t immediately applied.

January 11th, 2023 — Mum applied through BirthInfo.ie for her records.

April 23rd, 2023 — The point when we know Mum’s case was finally with a case worker.

September 11th, 2023 — Mum finally got her files back, exactly 8 months to the day.

(And we’re still trying to get the entire full unredacted correspondence in particular - and a better scan of a page [which you see above] that didn’t look as if the book was chucked against a skirting board and a photo taken with a poor-quality camera)

Immediately, what hit me was just how much Sr. Sarto and the Sacred Hearts Adoption Society had on my mother and knowing they would never part with that to help my mother probably hurt more than anything. They had so much information they could’ve given to her and my mother wouldn’t get it from them. (And yet, they still apparently do not know where the 859 missing children of Bessborough are buried?)

Who knows? Maybe things could’ve been different. Mum might have got to meet her Mum for the first time in the early 2000s, rather than 2020. Ana* might have gotten to see me and my sister grow up, or we might have gotten to be a part of our cousin Victor’s* life.

It’s something as vital as that could be the difference between an adoptee getting to meet or not meeting their birth family. I have seen way too many stories from adoptees who wanted to meet their birth family but couldn’t because they were either lied to or could not get information about them to trace them. Luckily, my Mum was fortunate enough to meet her mother and is still in frequent contact with her. So while I am very glad my mum gets to build that bond with her birth family years later, the infantilisation and constant secrecy prohibited way too many prompter reunifications and tracing.

It’s perhaps the main reason I think some people are still in denial or constantly deflect whenever the topic of mother and baby homes and how devastating their impact was is brought up.

So, in actuality, before 2022, it was never “Here’s what I can tell you” — it was always (which I say with absolute conviction) “Here’s what I want to tell you”.

Welcome to my last blog post of 2024! What a year it has been. It was a year of genealogical discovery, advocacy frustration, and all-around challenges at many stages.

While I’m very proud of my accomplishments, I don’t think it would warrant a separate post covering what I’ve done over the year. I’m conscious of not seeming like someone who toots their own horn a lot, and I feel like I already do that - so I don’t want to keep adding to it. Not to mention, chances are I had already written about it in a post!

As 2024 is about to leave us in a few days, if anything, I’m more curious about the future. I know I will often sound like a broken record but I long for the day that survivors of mother and baby homes receive proper justice and are not just pushed to the side. I try to do my bit but wonder if it’ll ever be enough. It still hurts that a good bit of what was found by the Commission will not be released until 2050. (Only 25 years to go…) I made headway on one child in a Dublin institution whose death I hope to register. (I’ll talk about that more in a future blog post.)

But, that’s not to say I’m not looking forward to seeing what it holds. More genealogy and other research for me, I know that for sure. However, I’m dually aware that we live in surreal times and that the world can be really scary too (saying that as I see coverage on all kinds of world events) - so while it might be looking bright for me, that is a large contrast from other parts of the world

One other thing I always make sure to commemorate is my grandmother. Two minutes to midnight (which is when this blog post is scheduled to be sent out) on December 31st, 1994 — my grandmother Kathleen died. Today marks her 30th anniversary. Cancer cruelly took her from us at 58. I can only imagine how different things might have been had she still been with us.

As always, thank you to all who supported me by reading my posts and interacting with me online, whether that is sharing my posts or my research with a wider audience—every little bit has helped me. [And as a very small blogger, just finishing the year with 384 subscribers on here is amazing to me. So here’s hoping I get to connect with more of you in 2025!]

A short post [and Trigger Warning] today. Part of what I will talk about here is what I spoke about in ‘Facing uncertainty’. But, this is on the topic of stillbirths. So, if this is a sensitive topic for you, you may wish to give this post a miss.

I had hardly seen any coverage on something that I thought would be rather important (and I did not even know about this until I saw someone on Twitter talk about the topic), but it appears that not much has been said about it since the news was shared back in April.

Ireland had always been a step behind other areas when it came to stillbirths, something that was never recorded until the ability to do so was introduced in 1995, despite other countries doing this decades before.

Up to July 17th, 2024, there was only one place where stillbirths could be registered and that was called the Register of Stillbirths, a restricted record which only parents of the child could view — looking at the details of a child who was a stillbirth.

Since that date, there has been the introduction of an optional public record, called a Record of Stillbirth, meaning this will behave like a typical birth, marriage or death record you can get from the General Register Office, with no restriction on accessing it.

This is a much-needed change that was well overdue. It is a way of giving some recognition to stillborn children. One such example (which was the impetus behind writing this post) was this tweet. (The picture is included with Maria’s permission.) Seeing this from someone affected by the change and the positive impact that it had made is wonderful.

This is only one component of the Civil Registration (Electronic Registration) Act 2024, a new piece of legislation.

This has brought civil registration into the modern age, allowing the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and stillbirths online. This online facility incrementally allows vital events to be registered. Births can be registered since August, with deaths following later [as of the latest update on the legislation on August 26th 2024 here.]

* = names changed

On a cold winter’s morning in November of 1970 — one of the most important people in my life now came into being: my Mum. However, she was born in somewhat different circumstances compared to children who were born in the ‘ideal’ setting in Ireland during that time, Mum was born in a mother-and-baby home - in Bessborough. Her birthday, which was only yesterday, felt different. I thought of my grandmother, Ana* and how she must feel now that she has reunited with Mum and her half-sister, Rochelle*.

Ana* wouldn’t have been able to celebrate it with her until Mum was 50. [She’s now 54] — but I suppose I have a habit of defaulting to looking at what some might consider to be minor things but I consider to be quite major.

About a month ago, activist Carmel Cantwell and I travelled to the Roscommon General Register Office. I had been in talks with them to try to reach an agreement about finding birth records for about 450 infants (found by volunteers at Project Infant) to determine whether or not they were Bessborough babies and instead of the massive bill it would’ve left me with they gave me permission to visit and conduct my research.

We got there early enough to try to make our time worth it. I couldn’t take photos there, but the place was huge! It was like a genealogist’s candy shop. There were shelves and shelves of boxes each with Ireland’s civil records inside. We got a tour from the person in charge of looking after all of the records and he was excited to give the tour as I was getting it.

Before we got started with the list, we decided to have a test run to find someone using index books. So I went looking for Mum. I looked in the index book, found Matthews*, found Beth Matthews* and then got the reference, subsequently finding the corresponding box. We went leafing through pages until we found her. Her original birth entry was staring right back at me. Even though it was something I’d already known about and had seen, it was still an emotional thing to see it listed amongst everyone else. When births [or deaths] in mother and baby homes were registered, they tended to be registered in clusters.

So, I saw the cluster of births my Mum was part of. She was the 3rd of 4 children born in the space of a week. I just looked at the other three who were on the page and all I could think of was that there were three other people here on the page who would’ve been my mum’s crib mates in Bessborough. Were they all still alive? Where were they now? How did they leave Bessborough? (because my Mum was sent halfway up the country to be adopted from County Meath) Did they know they were born in Bessborough? What kind of lives did they lead? Hell, had I met them but never realised?

After finding Mum’s entry, Carmel and I got to work. Scouring through boxes and boxes of records to find the ones we were after noting down and recording whether they were a Bessborough child or not. It took us the entire day to find the records. Out of the 450 records or so, we found 37 names from it. [See below]

But, one thing that is a topic time and time again [and if it isn’t it should be] about the importance of doing what we can in trying to tell their stories. They’re part of a period of history, that there is still some hesitancy to discuss [either that or some think it is totally made up, which is wild to me, but they’re out there].

These children were wronged — the Commission [as I’ve said many a time] had an opportunity to publish these names but never did. No names would be known without the help of independent researchers and dedicated journalists who work to give survivors a voice and platform in the media.

So, if you happen to know or uncover someone in your family who died in an institution, help us fight for them, for them to have the dignity of the world knowing their name, for their right to have their burial place found and properly commemorated.

I’ll leave you on this. Carmel, who I’d mentioned above had met the Tánaiste, Micheál Martin yesterday and asked him questions [along with what I’d done with Roderic O’Gorman on November 15th]. Listen to how he responded to Carmel below.

Now we know with the general election looming over us on November 29th — everywhere we walk, drive and turn, telephone poles & lampposts are coated in election posters, all with some slogan to sway voters in their favour.

Below is a video, a Dáil debate - from October 2nd between Holly Cairns and Roderic O’Gorman (and a question from Claire Kerrane in the beginning). First, when the camera zooms out. Look how few attendees there actually are in the entire chamber. There are very few. But take note of what O’Gorman says in his responses to Cairns.

NOTE: The above video is a screen recording from my phone of the broadcast from the Oireachtas TV archive.

Boy, is there a story behind this photo. As I walk down the street returning home from college, I'm handed an election flyer by a man for the local Green Party candidate Monica Oikeh, not realising I just locked eyes with the man responsible for everything about mother and baby homes, Roderic O'Gorman.

I take it and walk on, trying to process who I'd just had a brief encounter with and as I'm talking to a friend [who's an adoptee and mother and baby homes survivor], she says "I hope you spoke to him!" & I hadn't. I was initially flustered because I had so much I wanted to say and wasn't sure if I'd sound brash or harsh.

But then I turned around and legged it back towards the street, hoping he was still there. Luckily enough, he was. He went into the shop (the one we're standing outside in the photo), and I started gathering my scattered thoughts. I set my phone to record the exchange so I didn't forget one detail.

I get his attention and next thing, I'm surrounded by him and ten other people as Roderic listens to me interrogate him about his work with mother and baby homes (something that I am quite critical about) - I kept eye contact with R O'G for a solid five minutes before he excused himself to continue canvassing but my heart was in my throat the whole time!

So, without realising, there were photographers snapping photos & journalists taking notes.

You can hear what was said below. I think it’s important that people hear what was said. You’ll notice that there is a lot mirrored between what O’Gorman had said to me versus what he said in the Dáil.

But you see, there were some interesting things that O’Gorman said that caught my attention. Let me break it down for you.

“[…] I visited the Bessborough site twice with survivor groups […] about a year ago.”

~ Roderic O’Gorman

There are two main groups. One I’m affiliated with (Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group), and the other one doesn’t want anything to do with me & had blocked me on social media because they disagreed with my view (below).

The group I’m replying to in the tweet above are the only group that Minister O’Gorman has engaged with — he has not done so with the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group. Carmel Cantwell, one of the main figures in that group who has been very vocal on social media was never contacted by O’Gorman anyone from Minister O’Gormans office.

“The scheme has had a lower take up rate, than we were expecting.”

~ Roderic O’Gorman

There’s a slight problem here, one of the ways you typically get the word out about the scheme (or anything) for that matter, is by advertising - right? There has been a lack of advertisement across the board. As I was walking to college one morning, I spotted this on a wall — this is the only physical advert, that was not on social media that I had seen so far. If you’re wondering where this was, it was on the corner of a bus station. Mum has said that she has heard about the scheme on the radio, but I’ve not heard it yet.

Another contributing factor would be the length of time it is taking for the applicants who are in their 80s and 90s to receive their redress. For some, they’ve gone to the media to share their story — only then had it prompted the department to prioritise them & to finally fulfil the application. I’ve also seen in groups on Facebook in particular where information is not adding up, from what applicants are being told versus the records that they have. They didn’t even make the waiver they would have to eventually sign public either (it was only public after I got it in an FOI request).

Not to mention the mixed emotions from eligible survivors, feeling torn over whether to even take it or not.

O’Gorman continues by saying that there was a genealogy expert introduced to help with tracing. Except, there’s one thing wrong with that.

My friend, Breda had been on the waiting list for a DNA expert to help her understand her results and had been waiting for a number of months. When she phoned Tusla to complain about the lack of contact after she’d been allocated a tracing officer, the team leader contacted her. She was the person who informed Breda that the DNA expert was no longer employed by Tusla. It was confirmed a couple of weeks later that the Adoption Authority of Ireland [AAI], the lawyers for the DCEDIY (Roderic O’Gorman’s department) & the National Advisor for Tusla, who had demanded that DNA tracing be stopped immediately. The DNA expert was available to the AAI but had refused to use or promote his work to anyone who contacted them previously.

As she found out from them, if the person you want traced through Tusla was not born in the Republic of Ireland, then that is not possible under Tusla’s tracing remit. (Which is already quite limited)

So — until she got in touch with Tusla who informed her that the DNA expert had been scrapped — no one had told her, and chances are not many (if any) others who were put on this list know either.

To conclude, from the Dáil video or from my exchange with Roderic O’Gorman — I suppose I find it difficult to comprehend that they would allow the many injustices to weigh on their collective conscience, to prohibit proper justice being served for anyone connected to a mother and baby institution & their families.

No one should have to be like me, hoping they manage to bump into an official on the street, subsequently interrogating him to try and get what they should already be entitled to.

The question remains — will this government and their elected officials (or any successive government for that matter) ever put their foot down to truly make change and will do survivors justice? I’m not holding my breath.

*NOTE* I started writing this post on September 18th (but got side-tracked), so the information & perspective below are intended to reflect information at the time, any new developments since will have been added in.

So, it has been over a month since my last post, I apologise for the radio silence, college has thrown a lot at me assignments wise and I’m just getting a handle on it all! Wanted to get something out while it’s still October.

You might (or might not) be aware of a collective battle to save the Bessborough grounds from development. In mid-September, it was revealed that one developer—MWB Two Ltd—who owns part of the Bessborough grounds had another of their planning applications scrapped by An Bórd Pleanála.

Rightly, it’s been another point of celebration for people, knowing that what they own won’t be developed. At least, MWB Two’s part anyway. Unfortunately, some media outlets have neglected to mention that two outstanding planning applications are still awaiting a verdict. These are both lodged by a developer called Estuary View Enterprises (or EVE, as I’ll refer to them from here on) and have been awaiting an answer since 2022, both applications can be found here and here.

People may feel that because MWB has been rejected it’s the majority of the land. That’s far from it. What I am about to share is paraphrasing from a Twitter thread by activist, Carmel Cantwell. You can read her entire thread here. It’s a damning read.

Below is a map showing who owns what parts of Bessborough, as you can see MWB Two own a smaller part, whereas EVE owns the vast majority of the grounds.

The two planning applications still awaiting a decision are ‘The Meadows’ [purple] and ‘The Farm’ [Orange]. The image below comes from here, from the ‘ABP Opinion Response Report (Architectural Items) file on page 3 in case you want to look at it yourself without my added highlights.

There has been little attention paid to EVE because what has been reported by another group who have been named in documents provided (and what has been taken as fact) is that the Children’s Burial Ground is where I have marked on the map with a blue circle.

The only issue with that theory is that despite trenches being put through the area, there were no remains found in that part of the grounds, see this article and this article for more. This has left many (myself included) to ask for more investigation into the grounds, but a lot of this has been falling on deaf ears.

Carmel speaks more sharing recollections from survivors about parts of the home that were used in her thread.

But, even with the plans for a ‘remembrance park’ being included in the plans for the development, this is because the developers can’t develop that part due to the landscape in front of the home. Irrespective of which, it is very unlikely that they would even bury any child in front of the door of Bessborough House as it would’ve been quite obvious to anyone who did visit Bessborough. The whole premise of building this remembrance park is a feckless token to try and sway the decision makers in allowing it to happen, the aim, a false sense of care towards those affected (and their families).

As for what we are continuing to press for is an investigation. An investigation to provide answers to 859 missing children’s families. That number does not include the number of stillbirths that weren’t registered. 859 mothers who lost their children. 859 questions left unanswered. 859 families who deserve clarity. 859 reasons to investigate. 859 children who don’t have a definite resting place their families can visit to mourn.

We should not attempt to substitute the truth with a false sense of comfort.

The above map with added arrows are where there have been accounts of people seeing where burials had taken place. But even with these eyewitness accounts, there is a lack of desire for the government to do anything.

So, please send this blog post to your TDs, Councillors, Representatives — anybody, for crying out loud. Your Facebook feed, Twitter page, Instagram story, WhatsApp status - anything that might just get the word out.

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However, with an imminent general election looming over us here in Ireland, there are some… campaigns(?) [best word I could use here] by politicians here to entice potential voters into their corner. Some are smart, and some are awful and just tone-deaf. It swings in roundabouts. But, this one I thought was just downright ridiculous. A few days after the decision regarding the planning proposal had been announced, this article was put out. [Click here to view the article]

Micheál Martin, our Tánaiste had stated [in short terms] that the State should’ve bought the grounds of Bessborough. Now, you might be thinking why am I making a big deal out of this? That’s because Micheál Martin could have bought Bessborough. After all, he was Ireland’s Taoiseach from 2020 to 2022 and people have been asking him to buy it even when he was Taoiseach.

Of course, it’s how it always goes — would he have bought Bessborough? Could he have bought Bessborough? He should have bought Bessborough.

This fight is not over. Not until we have justice and the truth for the missing children of Bessborough.

[This is a post about upcoming talks, but don’t you worry — I have three new posts that I’m working on, so stay tuned…]

I’m very fortunate to report that in between the madness of college and Project Infant, I’m back to giving more talks. So here are the ones that are coming up in the next two weeks.

Talk 1:

Talk 1 is ‘The Beginnings and Impact of Project Infant’ — it’s been over two years since Project Infant started in July 2022, so let’s have a look at what it’s been able to accomplish with the help of the volunteers who make the research happen.

This is on Day 7 of All About That Place run by the Society of Genealogists [SOG], the Society of One-Place Studies [SOPS], the British Association for Local History [BALH] and Genealogy Stories. My talk will be on at 7:00 am Irish Time on October 3rd. This talk is pre-recorded, so don’t worry about catching it live, you’ll be able to find it on the Society of Genealogists’ YouTube Channel.

Talk 2:

Talk 2 is ‘Get Up and Go: Genealogy For Good’ — this one is going to be fun as this is one that I’ve never given before. This talk will be part of an event called NextGENeration - Discoveries run by the Society of Genealogists and the Family History Federation on October 5th. This is the second time this event has been run, with the first being in 2022 (and there were glowing reviews across the board), so I am very excited that they are doing this event once again. You can sign up for the conference by clicking on the event name above. They have a ‘Pay What You Can’ system meaning while you are not obligated to pay, if you want to financially support the event you can do so when ordering your ticket.

[And in case you’re wondering, no that graphic doesn’t have a typo with my age - at least when the event happens, that is. I’ll have just turned 21 the day before!]

Talk 3:

Talk 3 is ‘Trials and Tribulations: Mother and Baby Homes’ — this one will give a history of the homes, but will include an angle I’ve not covered much in talks before and the impact that has had on survivors in the present day. This talk is part of a seminar by the Genealogical Society of Queensland called Forgotten Women and Children. This will take place on October 12th.

It is an online event via Zoom and tickets & more information can be found by clicking on the event name above.

Now, those are the ones that are finalised and in the diary. I have two more that I can reveal, but I don’t know the total specifics in terms of date and time (yet). It was something I didn’t expect to announce, but I have the honour of speaking at RootsTech 2025! Now, to clear up the confusion, as I think there was some the first time I shared the news, that I will not be in Salt Lake City in person. However, I will be giving the [two] talks live from my desk in Ireland, so there is that. I also would not be able to make it due to the expenses of travel, accommodation etc. not to mention I’d still be in the middle of my college course, so only slightly inconvenient.

But it will be an experience nonetheless! If you’re not aware — RootsTech is taking place from March 6th - 8th 2025. They have opened registration for the event today, which you can do here.

My talks are:

• On The Record: An Introduction to Civil Registration in Ireland

• Examining the Irish Census

As I don’t have specifics yet, please consider subscribing to my blog so you don’t miss an update about talks I give (and so you can read my other genealogy and non-genealogy-related musings / ramblings).

Subscribe now

Writing is cathartic for me and a great way to get the tangled mess in my brain, out, so that whatever is in it at the time, doesn’t stay with me. But writing for me is like a time capsule. If I go back and look at stuff I’ve written in diaries or notes, things come flooding back to me. I can remember how I was feeling, which is a great thing for me, but knowing the power that holds for me makes sense why I never wrote any of this down. Probably as this was a painful time I didn’t want to remember and promised myself that I wouldn’t say any of this outside my immediate family.

But, looking at pastures new, college-wise that I’m going to be diving into rather soon and with my 21st birthday in early October - I see both of these things as milestones and I just want to do this for myself so that when I hit both of those milestones - it’s me confronting and closing the door on that chapter, and on the off chance if it does help somebody else, wonderful. I know this may also trigger others, so please don’t worry if you want to pass on reading this. It’s not a cheery subject. I can’t remember everything that happened as I think I’ve tried to block it out, but this is what I do remember. What I’m writing is as events as they happened, but again - the order in which they happened, may vary.

It’s about my experience in secondary school and subsequent bullying, loneliness and everything that comes with it.

I started secondary school back in August 2016, this was a change in my life that was going to happen and I went with one school because it was where two people (out of 19 in my class) I was friendly with in primary school went, but we fell out of touch afterwards — so I was very much on my own. I can remember my first day, only certain years were in so the school bus I took had hardly anyone on it. It was me and one other boy, whom I’ll call ‘Damien’ for this. Damien was one year above me. I sheepishly said hello and introduced myself and he seemed friendly. We were chatting and things seemed to be okay. So me being me, I naïvely thought — maybe I’ve made a new friend?

But sadly, as time went on - I would realise things weren’t as they seemed and I was a fool.

It was lunchtime and I went to find a quiet place to have lunch because I was trying to process the new environment myself. I walked into one classroom and in walked an SNA (special needs assistant) and a student. That’s when I met Ms. H - the only person who helped me get through the four years I was at this school. I was walking towards the door realising it was in use, but Ms. H was happy for me to stay. So I stayed and chatted with Ms. H and the student and little did I know, that was my routine for 95% of my time there. I’d chat with them in the morning before classes and at lunchtime.

As I started to talk to Damien more, it was giving him more cannon fodder for him to use against me. Neutral conversations turned into sessions where Damien would start to pick on me, picking on me for my looks and my interests. Things that aren’t that much of a deal for me now, but for 13-year-old me, they meant everything.

The first tipping point, I was coming back on the bus - this was a few months into the first year and one time I was getting near my stop and Damien and another student were talking to me and were mocking me. Just before I got up, I had the contents of a water bottle thrown down the front of me. I was soaked. I confronted them and just gave me a lousy reason amounting to the effect that it was an accident. I went bright red, embarrassed as I got off the bus while I could hear the students laughing. I ran to the car where Dad was waiting for me, he looked confused wondering why I looked like I just went for a dip in a lake in my school uniform. I told him what happened and Dad urged me to tell him which student did it. Fearing that it would just be asking for more trouble and encouraging them to pick on me more if I blabbed to my parents, I was stubborn and I refused. Dad, who at this point, was irritated at my refusal gave up and drove us home.

My parents told me to report this to management, and I did - reluctantly. The deputy principal commended me for telling him and stated he’d do something about it. To my knowledge, he did - but it was futile.

One of my ‘faults’, you could say was that I acted more mature for my age - it’s the way I’ve been, always have. One of the things I never liked to do was swear and for some reason, seemed like the perfect invitation for some people down the hall from where my locker was to just hurl a ton of profanity at me. I also didn’t understand half of the lingo / phrases my peers used - it was almost like hearing a listening comprehension and being asked to translate word for word what they said, it was entirely alien. My other fault was I was probably the most trusting and gullible person you’d ever met. I’d always try to see the good in everyone, but the only reason people would be friendly with me would just be to catch up on notes / homework they missed for a class. That was the most interaction I tended to get.

But it wasn’t only Damien who picked on me. Due to my appearance (I hadn’t changed much from the photo above) - I’d be impersonated on social media — specifically, Instagram (and Google Plus of all things) and I’d be added to chat groups on Snapchat where it would just be people sending things with my face photoshopped onto them. I knew the photo used was one that was taken without my consent. I saw the person take it and I told him to get rid of it. He did. But not without posting it to his Snapchat story first.

Then came January 2017, when my granduncle Pádraig died and we went up to his wake in Dublin and questioned my parents about just how much we knew about our family - if this part sounds familiar, this was when my love of genealogy was born.

The antics on the bus would just get worse and worse, from Damien trying to show me adult content I did not want to see to having verbal abuse thrown at me or just general teasing.

Around this time, my grandfather Colum was in and out of hospital and over the next few months he got worse. I remember one time in either March or April 2017, I was in English class knowing that my grandfather was not doing so well having just seen him in the hospital hooked up to so many machines the previous day. I broke down, crying hysterically and I was brought out of class to calm down and couldn’t focus on anything - I was worried sick about my grandad. That’s where Ms. H helped me because she was the only one who knew about my grandad, I’d tell her stories about him and she was with me as she knew I needed someone to talk to.

Sunday, May 14th 2017 - it was a miserable day. We had been going up to Dublin every weekend to see my Grandad in the hospice he had been moved to. By this point, it sunk in for me that he was not going to get any better. My parents, before we left had told us to say goodbye to Grandad as we did not know when we’d see him again. He passed the following night.

On the Tuesday, I went into school as normal still wondering if we’d be seeing Grandad this Sunday - thinking that we’d see him again. Mum had called the school to talk to Ms. H to tell her that Grandad had passed Monday night. I can’t imagine how she felt knowing that he was gone but I didn’t know yet (Mum would tell me that afternoon) and I was talking about him, about how I may see him again on Sunday.

This time was one of the most vulnerable times of my life, it didn’t take long to tip me over the edge and I do remember breaking down on the bus a few times but refused to say why because I knew that Damien would find some way to use it and I would not let him use my Grandad to break me down.

Late 2018 was a blur as Damien would just relentlessly keep picking on me daily. Nothing immediately stood out to me until one moment in early 2019, I came home after just taking and taking more abuse from Damien and I got into a shouting match with my parents where we were both getting hacked off with the whole situation with Damien and the management doing nothing about it. They both asked me, exasperatedly what I wanted them to do and I screamed at my parents two words: “Switch school?!”. The room went so silent, you could hear a pin drop, I never did that before and I spooked myself. I apologised and went upstairs to just cry, something that was second nature to me, bordering on a routine.

The following morning, I was chatting to Ms. H as I’d done every other day before that but she sensed that I was more quiet and withdrawn than I usually was around her. When the bell rang, the other students in the room left to go to their classes and Ms. H asked me if I was ok. On the verge of tears, I weakly responded saying ‘yes’. She knew something was up, so she shut the door when everyone else had left and I just lost it. I eventually (in between the crying fits) told her what was going on and said to the effect “I don’t want to go to this school anymore, I want to switch”. She had known about every single run-in with Damien and knew this because of him. I had never been in this state, a mentally tortured person. She told me she was going to do something but told me to go to my classes and someone would want to talk to me. I was in English class when my year head knocked on the door and asked to speak with me, my class doing the childish taunting thinking I was getting into trouble. She had asked me about Damien and how long it had been going on. She had asked me why I never reported it, not realising I had been but gave up as it never amounted to anything. No amount of disciplinary action seemed to bother Damien.

She told me, she was going to bring me into an office for me to talk to Damien and the other deputy principal. [Our school had two as it had a lot of students] I immediately clammed up and was afraid as I was already with him over 2 hours a day with the commutes so I tried to get out of going into the office. She told me the deputy principal had talked to him and wanted me to go hear what Damien had to say. I walked in expecting to get a dirty look from Damien realising I was going to face consequences later. But, this time - he had his head in his hands and was the one crying. It was unusual, I felt sad as I hate to see people upset, but at the same I felt conflicted as this was my bully, seeing him the way I had been on an all too regular basis felt like a form of justice. Then it crossed my mind, it was a flicker of hope realising that this might be the end of this chapter and the start of picking up the pieces of me. Mind you, I have no idea what the deputy principal had said to him to reduce him to this.

On the bus home, I smiled to myself - Damien never said a word to me. I got off the bus, and got in the car smiling - Dad couldn’t believe what had happened. Got in the door and told Mum the same thing, that was the first good day I can remember in secondary school.

Sadly, it was short-lived. Damien started up again the following day and things went back to normal. I lost that smile very quickly.

Then came the summer of 2019. June 15th 2019 — the day after my Junior Cert exams finished, I embarked on the journey that has led me to the point where you know about me, follow me on social media and are reading this blog - Daniel’s Genealogy, the pseudonym I went by for a good few months — the sole reason was so that Damien wouldn’t know it was me.

That didn’t last long. A few weeks into D’s G - I got a DM from him on Instagram. My heart sank, but he was cordial. So, I (gullibly) thought that he didn’t realise it was me. He wanted assistance trying to find more out about his grandfather or something and kept insisting on meeting me. I told him I couldn’t because I was out of the country (a white lie on my part). He tried a couple more times to convince me to meet up with him, which I swiftly declined and after a while, it became clear that he knew it was me the whole time. (And I’m well aware that it wasn’t like a top-secret thing) - he hurled a torrent of abuse and his last message to me before I blocked him was C U Next… well, I’ll let you finish that yourself. At the time I didn’t realise what it meant until Mum helped me put the pieces together.

I almost stopped D’s G altogether, until I joined Twitter which became my outlet where I could be myself. And I clung onto that, for dear life. (Still do a bit today…)

On the first day back at term, I told the head of my class about the online harassment from Damien but was told that nothing would be done as it happened outside of school. (And reporting to Instagram does bugger all as well, so…)

So I just took it & while I appeared happy on social media, in real life - I was not, I was miserable. I’d also found out over the summer that the school I was hoping to transfer to wouldn’t take me that year as they were full which meant I had to go through another year before we could try again.

In early March 2020, we had a mindfulness day - we had done different activities throughout the day and we wrapped up the day on one activity that was dedicated to writing anonymous positive messages to each other. I looked at my sheets with messages intended for me & it broke me. There were so many messages appreciating what I did, but evidently, these were ones, not many people wanted to come up to me and say, I still keep them in a safe place and treasure them. It just felt nice to not read or hear nasty things, even if it were only for a few minutes.

Then came March 12th, 2020 — the day everything shut down in Ireland. It was a bizarre day, the intercom system had never been used so much as it was a ton of cancellations for events and other things in the school and everyone was thinking it was going to be over in a matter of weeks. Boy, did we have no clue? I remember it rained heavily that day. We were told to bring as many books as we could home as no one was sure when we’d be able to go back to get any. So I took as many as my bag and arms could carry and waited for the bus in tipping rain trying to shield my books from getting wet. It marked the start of online school, which I loved as it meant I didn’t have to see Damien every day.

One day, Mum sat me down to tell me the other school would take me. I didn’t believe it at first but it quickly sunk in that this was very true and very real. I hugged my mum tightly as we both cried happy tears — this was a period of my life that was over. I’d never have to go back. I’d never have to see Damien again. But then I realised I wouldn’t see Ms. H, the one person who helped me through that school. I emailed her to tell her and we’ve kept in contact ever since. She made such a positive impact on my life, I don’t know if she knows just how much.

But, that’s not to say it didn’t affect me, I’m a very anxious and shy person who will likely beat himself up over nothing. I find it difficult to talk to people and that school left me with some trust issues to a certain degree, but since then I’ve been working on myself to try and reduce them. But I think no matter how much I do, there’ll be a mark from that school that won’t quite buff out. I knew I was going to have to channel and let go of this & I definitely feel better after writing this, there definitely was a level of inspiration when actress Katy Wix wrote “Could you forgive your bully?”. I don’t think I ever could. Not after every single thing he did to me. I know we joke that if we had a time machine we’d go back and quiz a certain ancestor about something that would help us to find them. If it were me, I’d go back just to hug my 15-year-old self — and to tell him that it all turns out okay in the end, it’s just really flippin’ bumpy.

If you’ve read this far, please know I appreciate you so much - for taking the time to read my story. It means so much. Not to mention, I’m no longer suffering in silence.

--

RESOURCES:

⁠YouTube clip⁠ of mother, Madeleine who spoke at the 2024 Bessborough Commemoration.

⁠News pieces⁠ about mother and baby homes (not just Bessborough)

⁠Bessborough book⁠ by Deirdre Finnerty - contains the accounts of three women who went through Bessborough.

I am always trying to improve myself and how I do things in genealogy. One of those things is writing about my ancestors and trying to do their memory justice.

Today (August 16th is when I started writing this), I went up to what my paternal grandparents and their parents called home for many years. It just so happened to be the birthday of my grandfather’s mother, Ellen. My great-grandmother Ellen was born on August 16th, 1885 — the 9th (and last) child of Michael Noone and Margaret Conlon in Treenduff, Bohola, Mayo [where the above photo was taken]. She had two sisters, Kate [1878] & Mary [1881] and had six brothers, Thomas [1869], Patrick [1870] Michael [1871], John [1873], Pat [1873] and Michael [1876].

They lived on a farm in Treenduff and had one outhouse and a barn.

In the 1901 Census, I found Michael & Margaret with three of their children: Michael, Mary and Ellen living in Toorcananagh.

On December 13th, 1909 - Ellen lost her mother, Margaret, who died aged 63 from rheumatism, although this was not certified.

Just a little over two weeks before the 1911 Census, Ellen had married my great-grandfather, John Loftus - a farmer of Rosslevin, Bohola.

John moved into the family home in Treenduff and lived with Michael and Ellen. I found Michael Noone with his daughter Ellen and new son-in-law John.

John and Ellen went on to have eight children together. My grandfather, Michael was the 7th child.

Whenever we return to the ‘old house’ (as my Dad calls it), Dad likes to tell us a new story we haven’t heard. When my grandparents married in 1955, they moved with their young daughter to England in 1957, creating a new life there. A few of Grandad’s siblings did the same. But before that, my grandfather was still living with his parents & in 1954, they built the ‘old house’ (but it’s the newer looking of the two). My grandfather helped build it and had an eye for detail, adding little shards of pebbledash-style glass in the wall, there were two little bedrooms, a kitchen, a ‘front room’ and the ‘posh room’.

I didn’t have many stories of my great-grandparents but thankfully I still had an email from one of my Dad’s cousins who remembered her very well & described her in-depth.

He said that she would always wear a longish black skirt with a white blouse and a dark-coloured cardigan with her grey hair tucked up in a bun. According to him, he understood that Ellen had lost an eye at some point & had an artificial one but he didn’t notice it. Two little anecdotes he included were that he remembered Ellen used to smoke a pipe and recalled her sitting on a box where she kept all the bits for the pipe. He remembers being instructed by Ellen that if anyone were to ask him what she was doing to tell them “Granny is doing her teeth.”

The other one was about her drinking a mug of tea. She’d leave the mug to sit on her knee and he’d sit waiting for it to fall / spill. But she never spilt a drop and the mug never fell. He still wonders to this day how she managed to do it.

When Ellen and her husband, John died in 1963 and 1957 (respectively) - the house went to my granduncle Luke who lived there until he died in 1984. Ellen, John and Luke are all buried in St Joseph’s Cemetery, Bohola.

We had then gone to the home where my grandmother’s parents died. My grandmother, Annie-Mae, was born on October 30th, 1923. She grew up a few kilometres away from my grandfather in a townland outside Kiltimagh, called Ballure. This was not the house where she was born as that was only down the road from this one, but just wanted to state that before!

She was the fifth of seven children to James Carney and Delia Lavin.

I don’t have many stories about this part of the family, but one was about the middle child James and it surrounded how he died. James was only 2 years and 5 months old when he died. On James’ death entry, he’s recorded as dying from a ‘septic wound of nostril’. From what I heard from my Dad and my uncle, it was a freak accident and he either fell onto a nail or got hit with one somehow. My grandmother wasn’t born yet as James died in March 1923 and my grandmother was born that October, but no one ever seemed to speak about it. Nobody in my immediate family knows much about the eldest child Anthony either apart from what I’ve told them.

The other one was about my grandfather James, who like Delia had emigrated to New York (and James just missed being on the 1910 US Census by about a week too! Delia emigrated in 1908). They married there on November 10th 1912 but both moved back to Ireland less than a year later. Delia was pregnant with Anthony when she was going back.

My Dad has a vague memory of his grandfather James when his family used to go back to Ireland and can remember what he looked like. I’m waiting for a machine that could take a screenshot of a memory so I can have a photo of James as we do not have any photos of James or Delia and likely will never have any. Neither Bridget’s nor Teresa’s daughters have any photos of them.

When Delia and James died in 1965 & 1970 (respectively), they were buried in Kilkinure Cemetery in Kiltimagh, Mayo. Their son Paddy was also buried with them when he died in 2006.

But, in Mayo, it’s peaceful — it feels familiar. I’ve been going down to Mayo for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those places where I feel the connection to those who came before me. It’s one of the stomping grounds in my family. Where would they be for you?

[NOTE! This post is longer than my usual, so you may have to read this on the browser version. You can do this by clicking on the post title: “Precautions” and read this post that way.]

Nowadays, scams and fake [insert thing(s) here] are rife on social media and the internet. Last week I posted a blog post documenting over 240 fake memorials created by a volunteer on Find a Grave and safe to say it caught the attention of many including my own. Whenever I’m scrolling through my timelines on Twitter and Facebook, I tend to see (more so on Facebook) these AI-generated images which many take as genuine. Or maybe you’ve received some degree of interaction from ‘widowed army men’ who seem desperate to get to know you more. But, there is one tool I’d encourage more people to use: reverse image searching. I briefly touched on it last week, but at the request of some commenters, I’m expanding on it! So, here’s how you can do reverse image searching with an example of it.

REVERSE IMAGE SEARCHING

A few days ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from an account named Austin Scott Miller who judging by the photo was in the US Army. But there were a few things here that weren’t quite up to scratch.

Take a look underneath the person’s name, you can see a handle. Now, everyone on Facebook is given a handle / URL extension. For instance, my Facebook page’s URL is [facebook.com]/danielloftusgenealogy. Whatever is after the forward-slash when you visit your Facebook profile is your handle.

But, if you were to receive a friend request from my personal page, this is what you would see - you can see there is no (@)handle underneath my name.

So, why is there a difference? You see ‘Austin’ is not a traditional personal profile or business Facebook page. ‘Austin’ is an additional profile. When you click on the three dots on your profile, you can ‘create another profile’, so if you had two strong interests for example genealogy and gardening and wanted to keep both separate from each other, you could manage a separate profile which you could manage from your main account. However, I’m sure Facebook anticipated this would be used for non-nefarious purposes, but as with anything on the internet, abuse of features will reign.

Facebook allows four additional profiles to be created per account. Meaning, that I could make myself appear as four additional people, for example, I could set up more profiles and I can be ‘John’, ‘Cory’, ‘Mark’, ‘Lee’ - you name it, I could manage ‘their’ profiles from my account.

So, that is the tell-tale sign to see if someone who is trying to friend you / someone you’re interacting with is one of these additional profiles or not. But, let’s presume that I might not be au-fait with it all and think it’s a real person. How can I reverse image search their profile picture to make sure that’s true too?

First things first, two (of the many) tools you can use (and what I use) are Tineye and Google Image Search.

Above is a video version of how I do it, but here are the written instructions.

1. Click on an image [profile picture would be a good start], then right-click on the image and click ‘Copy image’. This copies the image to your clipboard. Go to Tineye, click the ‘paste or enter image URL’ field and then paste the image by using Ctrl + V [Windows] / Cmd + V. [Mac]

2. This will show you the websites where the image has been used. It’d be worth having a look as more often than not, it may be used in a news article. However, if there are no results for Tineye, I’d then use Google Image Search, and use the ‘Google Lens’ feature that it gives. Do the same by pasting the image into the ‘Paste image link’ field.

3. If Google Images does not show a result when you paste an image - you may need to press the ‘Find image source’ button.

But what if this is the actual Austin Scott Miller? Either, he’s very bad at remembering passwords and has to create more and more Facebook accounts because of that or he really would like to be a friend of the [Facebook] world. This is only a sample of all of the Austin Scott Millers that there are — speaking as someone who once had two Facebook accounts to separate friends and family from my genealogy connections, I eventually merged the two into one - it’s not feasible…

Lastly, make sure to block them! If one of these bots are in a group, there is an option to ban them and any other profiles they may create, however, that is not the same thing here. As I can only block this sock puppet account, blocking this fake account does not block the main puppeteer managing these additional profiles.

[To note, it turns out this account was nuked before I published so this one has disappeared, but I’ll likely get another one very soon]

SPOTTING SCAMS IN FACEBOOK GROUPS

I’ve seen this occur on Facebook groups that are public where the contents of it can be seen by members & non-members alike. These are only some of the scams they use, but here are three examples. On the outside, it’s a call to action, designed to tug at your heartstrings. This will show how reverse image searching can help you here too.

Scam No. 1 — ‘The Missing Person’

The theme surrounding this one is fairly self-explanatory. The text used tends to be fairly consistent, and they tend to use the phrase ‘bump this post’ - which is an unusual way to phrase it, but it’s one of the main identifiers of it. (and the others that are on here)

Here’s an example of a post. Take a look at the group name — a buy-and-sell group for a missing person? I can understand there may be a sense of urgency to get the word out, but it’s a strange one. Let’s look at the poster: Pamela Haines. A look at her activity in this group, she shares nothing else but missing person notices in the group. And apparently, she’s a recently created business page for a grocery store. Dodgy. But notice how ‘Pamela’ turns off commenting? Why would they do that if an algorithm depends on interaction? But let’s do a bit of reverse image searching, shall we? These two photos do indeed match a missing girl, Charlotte Sena - however, Sena was found, in October 2023. So, again, why would there still be missing person posts sent around nine months after being found?

Scam No. 2 — ‘The Injured Animal’

Once again, we see similarities — post is in a buy & sell group, from ‘Elsa D. Sharp’ scammy business page and they use the ‘bump this post’ phrase. However, in this case, a reverse image search did not turn up anything, which likely means that it was a photo taken from someone’s social media.

Scam No. 3 - ‘The Adopted Person’

This last one is one that almost caught me out and at the time, it caught some of my friends. Anyone who has been adopted or knows someone who is adopted, knows how difficult it is to get information and I’ve seen some legitimate posts go round from people who post in groups as a last ditch attempt to try and find something or someone.

I had to scroll back through my posts on Facebook to find where I put the screenshots for this one as this was a while ago, but there’ve been plenty more of these kind of posts since.

This post was about someone trying to see if they could find their biological family and appears very genuine. They shared a photo of a young child and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, but when I put that photo of a child through the reverse image search, it appeared on numerous Reddit threads about trying to alter images and encouraged others to see what spin they could put on it.

One handy thing to note is when you click on an about page for a business [as ‘Elsa’, ‘Bob’ and ‘Pamela’ have been], you can see a creation date with a random page classification (health & beauty, gym, grocery store etc…) - which are the main ways to deduce who is a real person or a fake.

But it is crucial to note that there are many scams and we have to be responsible and careful with what we share on social media because on our Facebook pages, we invite our friends to see our posts and not all may be as technologically inclined to do this. So we have to try and do it for them too.

Friend or Foe?

This is not so much writing about a scam, but another thing to be aware of, friending someone who is already friends with you?

Remember, if a friend is already friends with you on Facebook, they can’t friend you again.

Go to your search bar and type in their name. If they show up with ‘Friend’ underneath, message them and send a screenshot of the profile and “ask is this you?”. There is nothing wrong with extra caution.

One other thing is the difference between being hacked and cloned.

Hacking is if your account has been accessed by someone who isn’t you. This person could use it to post things with scammy links (remember the ‘OMG this person just died, I think you knew them!’ posts?) / trying to solicit money or something from your friends.

Cloning (or spoofing) is when someone sets up a new account and tries to make it look like someone you know.

Lastly, please, for all that is sacred, please set up Two Factor Authentication (commonly written as 2FA) to add another layer to keeping your account secure!

You may have noticed that the scam posts I shared above like the missing person post both have over one thousand shares. But, why are these such a scam? It is so they can find targets. Targets they can try and impersonate. If you’re sharing these posts with privacy setting on public, they can see that. “But anything I share is friends only, what is the big deal?” - you have Facebook friends don’t you? What’s to say they won’t see it? They may see it and may very well share it and on & on it goes.

I’m hoping that the reverse image search tool and these examples will help you try and stay safe online (and help sort out the facts from the falsities) and as always, if you made it this far, thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more.

As people who do genealogy, one of the fundamentals when conducting research is not to take everything at face value. When I’ve got stuck on something, I’ll look at another member’s tree on a website, to try and give me another avenue to pursue and research myself. When I started, I took a lot at face value and did a lot of click, click, clicking and not much checking. I can remember one time I went on a FindaGrave adding spree where once I came out of it, relations were appearing on my tree like the ‘wife of the uncle of the niece of my 7th cousin 12x removed’.

Safe to say, that would come back to bite me later, but it taught me a lesson and prompted me to chop off that branch (that spree was entirely unnecessary) and to be more cautious and thorough in what I do. Especially with the technology we have available to us with genealogy sites giving us little hints along the way, we tend to trust that whatever is on it is always coming from a trusted source. Or, so we think.

Chatting on a Discord server a few nights ago set me off on the most unusual (while simultaneously interesting) rabbit hole. A member posted about stumbling across some unusual-looking Find a Grave memorials. This was the one that was shared with us.

Now, it looks like a normal memorial on Find a Grave that you could stumble across. But digging a little deeper, all was not as it seemed. They put the photo through a reverse image search tool to find that this was not Margaret Salsbury Whim but Eleanor Elizabeth Stephen, the eldest daughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, third Chief Justice of New South Wales.

Looking at the family who were listed for Margaret, there was something very strange. All of Margaret’s kids and her husband, for people who died in the ‘60s, ‘80s and ‘90s, had very recent photos on their memorials. Almost as if they didn’t match either. A reverse image search on the photos of her children showed that they were all photos of other people.

They were all created by one user. A quick look at their profile showed that they only started adding memorials back in September last year. They had added just under 250 memorials, but the question lingered. Were there more fake / falsely attributed images / memorials? So, with the help of Macy, Hunter and Elaine from the Treehouse Genealogy server on Discord, we got to work.

We listed all 246 memorials made by this user in a document and put all the ones which had an image attached to them through a reverse image search. Apart from one or two photos, practically every other image was INCORRECT / FALSELY ATTRIBUTED. This individual uploaded photos from stock images but also uploaded photos of people from random obituaries who had no relationship to the deceased. As for memorials, I had checked 10, it’d take a lot more to confirm the others, but they were fake.

One alarming part of this research is this volunteer decided to take photos from three users [the first, third and fourth in the below] on LinkedIn who are very much still alive and post them as the portraits of these decedents.

Below is what the entirety of our research yielded. Below are the sources of photos (if present) on this user’s memorials that were added. Only one was correctly attributed.

You’re probably thinking that this hasn’t done any harm / isn’t that misleading if these people don’t exist, right? Except, it has been misleading as one person has even gone as far as to request an image of the graves belonging to one of these non-existent people. Safe to say, you’ll be waiting for a while.

One memorial created was a non-existent son of Charles Francis Adams Jr. - a Brigadier General in the American Civil War. The non-existent son was named Charles Quincy Adams, except there was no son named that, according to Adams Jr’s WikiTree page. Even more, the photo of ‘Charles Quincy’ is actually Charles Francis, and is already on his Find a Grave page.

Additionally, this person even went as far as to create a memorial for someone who died in the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a noble thing to do — if the person existed. I checked the 9/11 Memorial’s website & a list of FDNY personnel who died. [I wish I was making this up]

Naturally, the next step would be to report the offending memorials, but on the Find a Grave site itself, you can only report the memorial on the page itself if it’s a duplicate, there is no button on the page that you can click on to report an actual memorial or any image that goes up. So, when you go to the Help page [at the bottom of the website] it’s one of the main FAQs.

If you’re trying to remove a photo and if you eventually find the Copyright Notice, you may think that it’ll almost be solved, until you see the long list of things you need just to take a photo down which only the copyright holder of the photo can do.

However, if you are trying to get a memorial taken down, the only saving grace is it’s not as much of a drawn-out process as the whole photo removal process. But honestly, I think even having a button on the memorial page to even say ‘Report Memorial / Photo’ would be an improvement, as minor as that may seem.

After researching this, it’s now made me think about reverse image searching all photos of people on memorials I come across just in case there are more of these situations. It might prompt you to do the same, as stuff that is put up on sites like Find a Grave may not always (but most of the time it should) be accurate. It only takes 30 seconds to check and is worth it.

For people wondering what tools we used to check these images, we used Tineye and Google Images.

Still staying on the Find a Grave angle, is how it shows up in my own mother and baby homes work. Three and a half years since the Commission of Investigation published its final report, we are still asking for investigations into the grounds of these institutions.

It’s sad to see that there are ‘graveyards’ on Find a Grave for Bessborough, Tuam and Sean Ross Abbey - yet we do not know who is / isn’t buried where. For Bessborough, all except one are plaques, a memory to those once lost, until we get some form of investigation done. We do not know precisely where they rest.

So, Find a Grave — every time I have spoken to you, you repeatedly said to me that you like hearing all opinions, so if you’re unwilling to police the hunt for newly deceased people by the volunteers who turn this whole activity into a game who care more about the stats than the families, I do hope that you’ll take swift action with the fake attributions / memorials on your website.

I’ve got the proof if you’re interested. Your choice.

An update: Once again, thank you to member, Alec for sharing & talking about this.

This morning at 6am my time, I got a message from a representative at Find a Grave, that the memorials along with the account who created them have now been removed. Credit where it’s due, thank you to Find a Grave for their swift action & thank you to all who read, shared and raised the alarm.

This post shall remain live as just because only one occurrence of this has been found so far does not mean that there isn’t more out there / can’t happen again.

Figured I should put a bit of Irish in at some point on my blog. [Fun fact: Fadó fadó means ‘long ago’] A lot has happened since I last wrote, despite that being a little over a week ago! The uncertainty has gone, which, first and foremost is great news to me in itself. To put a long story short, I hadn’t done much with Project Infant since late April as I wasn’t sure if a small technicality on Irish Genealogy was going to result in Project Infant sinking or swimming, but after a lot of back and forth between different people and a lot of waiting, I got confirmation that the work I’ve done at Project Infant safe. (That’s why I hadn’t said anything last time in case I jinxed anything. I wasn’t taking any chances)

Then, during the week - the Irish Independent wrote about an update to the Tuam exhumation, reiterating the confirmation from Daniel MacSweeney that it will begin in February 2025, but also only stated that a mere six samples had been collected.

Me, being my part-loudmouth self, had tweeted (in a bit of frustration too) about that if we [as a society] were more open about mother and baby homes, then more samples would have been collected and there wouldn’t be so much shame still surrounding it.

However, I think one issue that is that before a shovel has ever hit the soil, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. In this article (worth reading in its entirety), they discuss the technology that Forensic Science Ireland [who are dealing with the identification of remains] will acquire.

From the Irish Times:

The technology will allow for DNA extraction from a “range of challenging forensic sample types such as degraded blood, bones and teeth”, a request for tender document from FSI states.

The new DNA sequencing method will allow FSI scientists, at a minimum, to match remains to “third degree relatives”, a category which includes great-grandchildren, first cousins and half-nieces and nephews.

~ Conor Gallagher, Irish Times

But, you’re thinking, well that has to only be a positive thing, right? Just under that, was what FSI are actually going to do.

However, the legislation governing the Tuam investigation, the Institutional Burials Act 2022, provides for the collection of DNA only from closer relatives such as grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces.

~ Conor Gallagher, Irish Times

Despite this technology allowing them to cross reference them in databases such as FamilyTreeDNA and GEDMatch, they are also not choosing to do so either. So, due to legislation, I (strongly) feel that more could absolutely be done (and that is presented in that article), but because of it - it won’t be done. A conversation with a journalist later, that led to this piece being done in the Irish Mail on Sunday, which also featured genetic genealogist, Claire Bradley. I hope you can read the image, but if not — it has an online version here.

The example that I gave of why this measure was so restrictive was if you had a child who died in Tuam in 1961 [the year it closed], say the mother was 18 or 19. That would put her at the early 1940s. She may not be alive anymore, she may not have had other kids, there are too many outcomes with life and all that comes with it, that may prevent a child / mother who died at Tuam from being identified. The mother’s parents would be born perhaps 1900s / 1910s / 1920s.

But, let’s not get too hasty, let’s see who in this position may be able to give DNA [to identify a Tuam child]:

Grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces.

Well, aunts and uncles, I didn’t want to cross out, as they could very well be alive. But, look at it from this angle — how many (if any) of those above, would know about their connection to Tuam. No matter how long I go on for (and I could easily go on and on) - if people do not talk about this, how are we ever going to identify any of these children?

Except, the tribulations of this whole ordeal don’t end there. If you are lucky enough to even be eligible to give a sample, there’s also a part of the legislation [where I did not pick up on this immediately, so I’ll give a hat-tip to Thérèse - @teabiccy on this one] where you have to provide a letter from your other family members, that they don’t mind you giving a sample. So regardless of the obvious fact being you are choosing to give a sample, it could all be a disaster if someone in your family were to object to it.

So, despite how positive this all looks from an outside view, when you look beyond that, it’s clear there was plenty of room for improvement, and that ship sailed in 2022, so it can’t be reversed / altered either. Someone on Twitter even suggested doing [genetic] genealogy like what has been done in the United States to identify John & Jane Does.

Heck, even Othram wanted to get involved, and they showed more interest in this in a matter of minutes than the Irish government has in a lot of issues relating to mother and baby homes, which is absolutely depressing.

One more thing I had up my sleeve was to try and illustrate it for people. So, if you happen to be in (or have ancestral roots) in Galway and Mayo. Please take a look at this map and look into your own tree. You could be the key to identifying a set of remains at Tuam. I was alarmed that there were babies who died in Tuam who were from Bohola and Kiltimagh, where my paternal grandparents came from, with one surname [Lavin] showing up a lot in my family tree. It’s made me start to look into see if I am related to that child.

The appeal for giving DNA samples will be later in the year & I’ll try to keep people posted.

But, I digress — as today is yet another milestone. Today marks two years since Project Infant began.

So, I feel I need to give a thank you. Thank you to you, reader — who takes time out of your day to read what I have to say about children parts of society would rather forget, to ensure that doesn’t happen. Whether that’s Patricia Brennan or my Mum’s own story or me venting about roadblocks that I hit in my research - thank you. When you share my blog posts / tweets on social media, it helps me so much. It helps people to find me & I get to help them. But, none of this could have been possible without every single volunteer who helps me at Project Infant. To Aisling, Alec, Anna, Carmel C, Carmel O’D, Cate, Clare, Jess, John C, [the two!] John Ms, Kathryn, Lauren, Lisa R M, Lisa W, Lorna, Mairead, Mary M, Mel, Melanie, Monica, Nicky, Paul, Phoebe, Rachel & Theresina — thank you all.

If you would like to work with me and these amazing volunteers, you can find out how to do so here.

But, we’ve got plenty in store for you - which I was hoping to have up in time for the second anniversary - but it wasn’t to be. However, here’s a look at what the stats will look like once it is all up. [Image on left, is current. Image on right, is projected — quite a difference, right?]

Onwards & upwards!