20th Century Mother & Baby Home Scandals

Doublethink

Content warning: discussion of mother and infant mortality:

This story has made me wonder - and think maybe historically minded shipmates might know - were maternal, neo-nate and infant / child mortality rates in these places much higher than for others of a similar socio-economic background ?

And was unmarked burial unusual at the time for still births and infants ? I have feeling that separate burials for still births is a fairly late development.

I suppose what I am wondering, is; is what is seen in these graves a sign of gross neglect - or was it simply that at that time and place, that was the mortality rate, and the large numbers are simply due to the number of births happening the same place ?

North East Quine

Originally posted by Doublethink:

And was unmarked burial unusual at the time for still births and infants ? I have feeling that separate burials for still births is a fairly late development.

I don't think it was unusual. Our stillborn son is buried in what is more-or-less an unmarked grave. Aberdeen City Council had a plot within a main cemetery with a memorial to stillborn babies in the middle. Our son is buried in that large plot, and his name is on one of the kerb stones surrounding the plot. His kerb stone isn't far from his burial site, but that was more by co-incidence than anything else. There's nothing to mark the exact place of burial. We place flowers by his kerb stone, rather than in the middle of an expanse of grass. The kerb stones are of uniform design. Three lines - name, date, and something else. Our third line reads "Psalm 139 13-18"

That was in 1999. Fairly soon after that, a new stillbirth section was created. There is a line of gravestones (again, a uniform design) and three burial sites per gravestone. There are three sections per gravestone, with the same standard name, date and something else.

Our minister conducted a proper funeral, although it was a small funeral, as I was still post-partum.

North East Quine

I should add that although the exact burial sites are unmarked, there is a very large memorial stone with "In Memory of Stillborn Babies" on it, and so the situation of family members not knowing where a baby is buried, or not having somewhere to visit and lay flowers, would not arise.

Louise

Yes the death rate was shockingly higher in that home even by contemporary standards and that is documented.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/tuam-deaths-need-further-investigation-says-academic-expert-1.1822219

https://www.thejournal.ie/tuam-infant-deaths-1563994-Jul2014/

But that new BBC article doesn't give some relevant background- part of the scandal was that a number of burials
(Distressing detail)

allegedly took place in a septic tank and that would not have been a normal Catholic practice at all. I can't remember where the archaeological/ historical investigation has got to on that.

The BBC article you have there is about a different part of the grounds.

Back in 2014 horrific stories of abuse and maltreatment came out about that home and if I recall correctly, of families being told one thing about the fate of a child when quite another thing had happened. There seems to have been child trafficking and illegal adoption going on there as well. So people will have questions about whether relatives they were told had died had really done so or had been sent abroad and vice versa. So that's another reason why people want archaeological investigation and DNA testing.

And some people understandably dont want their dead relatives to lie where and how people they see as their abusers put them.

But so far as I can tell, this was an unusually bad case even by contemporary standards for that kind of institution

Doublethink

Thanks - it was exactly that kind of comparison I was wondering about.

Louise

Ah dear. I went digging and enough time has passed for there to be academic publication- further to the distressing detail mentioned above -

11.2.1 Summary of Findings
The test excavations revealed two subsurface structures in the ‘Memorial Garden’ (Fig. 11.3). The first was a nineteenth-century sewage containment system that had been decommissioned and filled with debris. The second was a rectangular concrete structure divided into 20 subsurface chambers. The function of this second structure was unclear. However, it appeared to be “related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water” (Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation, 2017), and significant quantities of human remains were discovered in at least 18 of the 20 chambers

The human remains were not fully accessed due to the confined nature of the chambers. Instead, analysis was conducted using photogrammetry, which was recorded on-site. Analysis of the skeletal remains indicated that the age at death of the individuals ranged from at least 35 foetal weeks to 2–3 years, with one individual being potentially 4–6 years of age. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the remains fell within the time frame of the operation of the Mother and Baby Home, that is, 1925–1961

So not the septic tank itself but what seems to be a related sewage/waste treatment area.

Source:
McCullagh, N.A., Lynch, L.G., Harte, A. (2025). Forensic Archaeological Investigations of the Former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland. In: Barone, P.M., Groen, W.M. (eds) Forensic Archaeology and New Multidisciplinary Approaches. Soil Forensics. Springer, Cham.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-86308-0_11

Published
25 May 2025

I was able to access this via National Library of Scotland online resources- you need access to Springer Nature Link to get the full chapter

Sandemaniac

Words fail me. That's like something out of the Holocaust, not a "Christian" organization.

North East Quine

The recent discovery of remains in coffins of, so far, eleven infants in a piece of ground which at least one map identified as a burial ground seems to me to be a separate issue to the earlier discovery of a large number of uncoffined remains within the sewarage system, and I'm surprised that the BBC are reporting it.

The linked story under "more on this story" is a far more important story.

Sandemaniac

I agree absolutely with you, @NEQ. I can only assume that someone has thought "Tuam mother & baby home scandal, we'd better report on this", when the real (greater?) scandal is elsewhere.