The Forgotten Child with Roots to Limerick

Donna - The Limerick Lineage

A story of abandonment, truth, and the courage to face both.

A very different story. I’ve known Donna for many years. Her childhood was stolen by parental abandonment, a mix of children’s homes and two disastrous fostering attempts. Donna grew up believing she didn’t belong anywhere. However painful, she felt she had a right to know why.

This story took years to tell, not because the facts were hard to find, but because the truth was. Once we began separating fact from the convenient lies she’d been told, the past began to reveal itself, and with it came the grieving process for a childhood denied.

Donna has given me permission to tell her story. She has faced her truth head on and now understands what every abandoned child deserves to know: that what happened to them was beyond their control.

Abandoned as a child, she had always felt alone. But her story led from London to Limerick and Dublin, where lost siblings, fractured loyalties and the scars of Ireland’s Civil War revealed a family history far more complex, and more human, than she had ever imagined.

Alongside that history ran another, quieter current: the power of the Catholic Church. In Ireland at that time, its influence reached deeply into family and community life. For many women, pregnancy could bring stigma, secrecy, separation from family and sometimes a lifetime of silence. Families could break apart under the weight of shame and social expectation, and generations carried the consequences.

Donna’s mother was one of those women. After returning her children to Ireland, without the one she had kept hidden, she herself was sent away. She returned to London and lived out the rest of her life there in quiet anonymity.

But there was something Donna would discover only much later. Her mother had kept her existence secret for the rest of her life. Even the husband with whom she had shared her life with since 1949 was never told about Donna. A small number of Donna’s siblings knew she existed, but to the wider family she remained unknown.

Donna herself has described her place in the family as its “dirty little secret”. They are difficult words, but they are hers, and they capture something the records alone never could: the knowledge that she had not simply been separated from her family, but had been kept outside its story.

For Donna, that discovery was both devastating and liberating. The truth was not kind, but it was real, and with it came understanding.

Having taken a DNA test, Donna learned she was 98% Irish. Both parents were Irish-born. That result, together with the one document she possessed, her birth certificate, became the foundation for her search.

As the family began to emerge from the records, so did siblings Donna had never known. Among them were twins born in London. One, Celia, died in infancy from acute tracheobronchitis. She had lived for only a few months, but finding her meant that another child who had almost disappeared from the family’s story finally had a name and a place within it, and a named grave to visit.

We found that Donna’s maternal line came from Limerick, a city with deep nationalist roots and scars from Ireland’s struggle for independence. By her teens, Donna knew she had two siblings, but they were already in Ireland, and that knowledge brought little comfort.

Tracking her mother’s journey, we uncovered the marriage that produced three older children, the family’s economic migration to Birmingham, and then the pivotal moment, her mother’s move to London. It was there that Donna was born, and where her own story began.

This was never destined to be a fairy-tale ending. Donna is now seventy; nothing we found could give her back the childhood she had lost. But what we uncovered together was something lasting: proof that even children raised without roots have a lineage, a history and a rightful place in their family’s story.

And perhaps that is the most important part of Donna’s story. A life that had been kept secret was no longer hidden. Donna could finally take her own place in the family history, not as somebody else’s secret, but in her own name. And the irony that when now given a choice on who she is, Donna has set down her own family roots, not in Ireland but Australia.