This is a tale of resilience, of a 66-year-old man who has endured the heart-wrenching sorrow of loss recently and knows what it is to live with uncertainty, yet one who loved and was loved in return and now is ready to open his heart to more of love’s potential. It is also a tale of persistence, of a woman who by all yardsticks lived a difficult and hardscrabble life, working menial jobs in and around 20^th century Dublin, who had to know hers was not a fit life for a child.  It’s a tale worth telling, and it’s my honor to share it with you.

My cousin Billy was adopted at 2½ years old by my Uncle Bob, my mother’s brother, and Aunt Betty. Although he does not know where he lived before that, likely he remained in the same place where he was born – at the Castlepollard Mother and Baby home in Castlepollard, County Westmeath, Ireland. Now, I wrote a blog a while back on Ireland’s horrid system of mother and baby homes  (https://wanderofwanders.com/index.php/2021/01/26/mother-and-baby-homes-a-dark-chapter-comes-to-light/), but let me just recap briefly. Between 1932 and 1998, 56,000 females and 57,000 children were processed through some 18 institutions for unwed mothers in Ireland. Run by various orders of nuns, with government complicity, they were places of cruelty toward girls and young women, neglect toward children.

When he was here in February, Billy and I visited Castlepollard. The long-abandoned mother and baby home stands at the end of a long driveway on a ridge over the town. Next to it is a small hospital, also abandoned, where Bill was probably born. A rusted set of swings stands in a nearby field. The tall, six-over-six windows of the home were shuttered on the first floor from the inside, all of the panes haphazardly broken. This is a place of ghosts. I could feel something, a presence, a sadness. It was eerie, made more eerie when I learned that after the home shut down, it became a facility for the mentally challenged that only closed in 2014. We were both glad we went, but I don’t think he’ll be going back.

Bill has no memory of those first years in Ireland – those formative years when a child learns to walk and talk, yes, but also how to love and trust, or not. I asked him recently if he thought there were any lasting repercussions from that time. Yes, he said, without hesitation.

“I had a lot of insecurities. I was not sure of myself. I didn’t have anyone like me. Blood is pretty important, but I didn’t have blood family,” he said. He does have an older brother, my cousin Rob, who is German by birth and adopted at 3 years old. Sharing that adoptive status, and the same uncertainty over their early childhood, they were and remain “pretty tight.” But the fact is, Bill said, “I didn’t have anyone like me. Ever. And I felt insecure.”

Bill would go on to marry the woman of his dreams, and operate a number of businesses with Jackie in Hilton Head, SC, where he moved after my aunt and uncle retired there. But like a faint and insistent Irish jig, he kept in his heart his birth home. “Ireland has always been on my mind. It’s not like I was born in Iowa, I was born in Ireland. It was such a distant memory, so far away, but always there.”

He had come to the US as a child with a small portfolio of adoption paperwork, including his birth certificate. He found these documents when he was 10, in a chest in his parents’ house, and asked if he could have them. Of course, they said. They belong to you.

Since then, he has known his birth mother’s name; but until recently, Anastasia Furlong was only a few words on a yellowing piece of paper. They were nonetheless words that mattered, because he and Jackie named their daughter Jillian Furlong Littin when she was born. Today, he knows quite a bit more about Anastasia, thanks to the persistence of an Irishwoman he met for the first time when he came here – a woman all signs point to being his birth half-sister. But let’s leave that felicitous reunion with Maria aside for the moment, and return to Anastasia.

She haunts me, this Anastasia. I can see her, almost, in my mind’s eye, a woman who was treated pretty shabbily by life, a woman who appears to have birthed and given up for adoption at least four children, a woman I refuse to judge. She was likely born in May 1935 to parents William and Anne Furlong in County Wexford, Ireland, one of eight children. She was also born into an unforgiving Catholic country that wouldn’t have taken at all kindly to an unmarried mother. Of her life until she had Bill in 1957 at the age of 22, there’s no paper trail. But we can be sure it took a turn for the worse when she became pregnant. Did her parents disown her? She wouldn’t be the first. Bill’s DNA trail names a John Quigley as the father, but who was he? And who was he to her?

Here is the outline of her life. She worked as a domestic housekeeper in Dublin for 10 years, and then took a similar job at Richmond Hospital, also in Dublin. She was working there in 1968 when she had another son, Martin, who was to be adopted shortly thereafter, and when she had Maria in February, 1971 – a full 14 years after Bill was born. Maria’s was a private adoption, and she was an only child. Anastasia could have been working at the hospital or as a private housekeeper in 1965 when she gave birth to Bernie, a daughter, who was adopted through St. Brigid’s Orphanage in Dublin. She may have later worked at another hospital in Dublin, but left due to health problems in the 1970s. This last information comes from Bernie, who had apparently done some searching on her own. Bernie also found out that Anastasia was likely living in housing for disabled elderly in the 1990s.

All of this information, all the links, were disseminated seven or eight years ago by a social worker at the Adoption Authority of Ireland, who was assigned Maria’s case after she filed a tracing request. All except for Bill’s information. He was the wild card, the unknown older sibling who came to light when he and Maria’s DNA evidence through ancestry.com pointed to a first-degree relationship. Just a few weeks ago, Maria contacted the same social worker, who said she had a bead on a sibling adopted to America but was unable was unable to follow through before she left for another job.

Did Anastasia ever marry? Was she able to keep and raise children at some point in her life? It seemed hard for Bill and Maria to wrap their head around the thought that someone would have four children, apparently as a single woman, and give them up – all to Catholic agencies, they note. Did the children share the same father? We don’t know, but they’d like to think, yes, of course, at least a few. But if so, what was he like? Did he take to drink, I have wondered, did she? They’ve toyed with the idea she could have been a prostitute, or at least gave up her body when times got tough. But they don’t know. The social worker told Maria in an email, “I have a lot of cases where women placed more than one child for adoption. I think this is down to the fact that contraception was illegal. I am sorry to be so forensic about it, but I do feel that this had a lot to do with it.”

It was all really due to his daughter Jill that Bill connected with Maria. Jill, an only child with an uncle, Rob, who didn’t have children, was yearning for family, I think. She texted Maria in 2021 after Billy’s DNA results came in. Could they be related?

By this time, things were not going well for Bill. When I said that he has been through heart-wrenching sorrow, I do not put too fine a point on it. Jackie had been beset by medical problems going back a decade or more, but by 2021 was getting much worse. For some time, Bill had been basically dying from a liver that had stopped properly functioning, but he finally received a truly life-giving transplant that year. His recovery time was pretty significant, though, as you can imagine. Jill was traveling to visit him at the hospital and her mother at home, when she was killed in a motor vehicle crash that November. Jackie, who Bill had been caretaking long before and after his surgery, finally succumbed last September. I am sorry for a certain dispassionate accounting of this. I am not up to adequately expressing the depths of the human heart that endures such pain.

Feel sympathy for Bill, please. There is no more deserving person. But do not let that be all that you feel. I also said this was a tale of resilience, and so it is. After Jackie died, he took stock. It would be so easy for someone burdened by such sorrow to simply, as he says, “spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a TV doing nothing.” But he has made other life choices, and it began with moving out of Hilton Head and its memories, for one, and visiting Ireland last month to connect with Maria – and reconnect with me, truth be told. He also met with a delightful Irishman whose adopted uncle may be Bill’s half-brother on his father’s side – this, too, due to DNA. But that – and perhaps a meeting with Bernie or Martin — is to be explored in further in trips that Bill will now be making regularly to the ould sod. (A southern boy for much of his life, he has no desire to live in the graying skies of Ireland, thank you very much.) Maybe he’ll sail here on the boat he intends to buy and live on soon.

He met Maria within days after arriving here in Ireland and then again just before he left to return to the states, when she presented him with a framed photo of the two of them taken during the earlier visit. In it, they have their arms around each other, both smiling. “When we hugged for that picture, I felt something, a connection,” said Bill. “It was really sweet and so special to me.”

As he says, blood is pretty important.