Milltown archaeologist to advise on Tuam baby burials
But Ms Maguire says there is a strong possibility there could be more
bodies in the area, some of which would be children who died before
they were baptised and therefore forbidden for many years from being
buried on consecrated ground.
These so-called cillini burials saw children, often stillborn,
secretly buried by their parents around the edge of cemeteries during
the night. That may have happened at the graveyard attached to the
workhouse that preceded the mother-and-baby home.
Many babies, she added, were buried in little more than a shroud
which will have disintegrated leaving thousands of bones all mixed
together.
She added that people should hold back on memorials until the extent
and location of burials is clear.
She told the Mirror: “People obviously are talking about a memorial
being erected here, but I would caution against that until the full
extent of burials is known. You could start digging up land for a
memorial and be bringing up remains with the soil depending on how
shallow they are.”
Ms Maguire said there will be a huge amount of work to do, cross-
referencing the nuns’s records against state records of how many
mothers and babies were sent to the home. The land will also be
studied and mapped to establish where the graveyard for the old work-
house on the site was, taking into account changes in the law that saw
graves moved outside the workhouse perimeter in the 1800s.
During the independent archaeologist’s excavation at Milltown, one mass
grave alone was found to contain at least 429 babies.
However, in an indication of the difficulties in such operations, she
added: “One grave digger we spoke to said on some days there were 50
babies brought to Milltown so they didn’t all get recorded.
"Also these graves remained open but covered for some time so parents
of stillborn babies for example would come to the grave in the middle
of the night and bury their children there, so the true extent of
burials is difficult to establish.
“I don’t think it would be the same scale at Tuam, but it’s certainly possible
given this home was runs by nuns and would have been seen as a holy place that
there could be burials close to the workhouse cemetery and that will add to the
complexity of any effort to establish how many babies are buried here.”
http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/crime/milltown-archaeologist-advise-tuam-baby-3656059