…your birth mother was told you had died.”
The director’s name was Harold Kemp. He sat down heavily in a chair beside the box and opened the folder again with trembling hands. Then he pointed to the eleventh name on the list. Next to it was a photo of a little boy in a sailor suit.
“That’s me,” he said.
The folder came from the St. Clare Home for Unwed Mothers, which had operated in our county from 1958 to 1972. Young women were sent there by their families to give birth in secret. Some of them gave their babies up willingly. Twenty-seven of them did not. They were told, in the delivery room, that their babies had died.
The babies were then given new birth certificates and placed with adoptive families who paid large “donations” to the home. The red stamp, IDENTITY REASSIGNED, meant a child’s real birth record had been sealed and replaced.
Harold had found out he was adopted at fifty. He’d spent twenty years searching. He had heard rumors that St. Clare’s records had been destroyed in 1981, when the building was demolished. He’d taken the museum job partly in hope that something survived.
“I’ve walked past that box a hundred times,” he said.
We didn’t call anyone that night. We sat in the locked museum until two in the morning and read every page. My original name was Rose. My birth mother’s name was Mary Kelly. She was seventeen.
The next morning, we called a lawyer and a reporter. The story ran a month later. Within a week, the newspaper received calls from fourteen of the twenty-seven families.
One of them was from Mary Kelly. She was seventy-nine. She lived ninety miles away. She had kept a tiny pink knitted hat for sixty-two years in a drawer, the only thing the nurses had let her keep.
The parents who raised me were good people. They died believing my birth mother had given me up because she didn’t want me. They didn’t know either.
I met Mary in her garden. She put the pink hat in my hands and said, “I always knew you didn’t die. I could feel you somewhere.”
Harold found his birth mother’s grave three months later. He found a sister, too. The two of us organized a reunion for the St. Clare families last spring. Nineteen people came. We read all twenty-seven names out loud, including the ones who never got the chance to be found.
