Anna Corrigan thought she was an only child.
It wasn't until she was in her 50s, researching her family tree, that she discovered a family secret: Corrigan found documents showing her mother, Bridget Dolan, had given birth to two boys in 1946 and 1950, in a home for unwed mothers.
It was an era when the Roman Catholic Church dominated Irish life. There was no sex education. Birth control and abortion were illegal, and pregnancy outside marriage brought shame.
Dolan died in 2001 without ever speaking about her sons.
"I never knew what she was going through," says Corrigan, 69, paging through black-and-white photos of her First Communion. "See the grip my mother has holding me? What was going through her mind, after losing two children? [Were they] taken away, dead, adopted?"
Throughout the 20th century, the Irish government and Catholic Church ran facilities called mother and baby homes, where single women who got pregnant could go to give birth. Mothers typically stayed about a year, while breastfeeding, but were then forced out — without their babies. These were similar to Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run, all-female workhouses where women who were considered disgraced often lived indefinitely, doing unpaid or underpaid labor, usually as laundresses.
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