Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

How far would you go for the missing?

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she found out she had a cousin, Mary, who she had never met. In 1950s Ireland, Clair's uncle had got his lover Lily pregnant and gone to England, leaving her and the family farm - his inheritance - behind. Lily and Mary ended up in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, not far from her grandmother's farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers, with no idea that Mary existed.

The truly shocking thing about this story is how ordinary it was. It was repeated in families across Ireland for decades: the last mother and baby home closed in 1998. How could this happen? How could a whole family - a whole country - tacitly agree to abandon unmarried mothers and their children to such a stark fate, even to their death? And how, Wills asks, could her grandmother live with herself?

To retrieve the missing, and make a new inheritance, Wills searches across archives and nations, from rural West Cork to Suffolk woodlands, from Paddington pubs to the factories of Massachusetts. But there are no easy resolutions, and there is a difference between a secret and a truth unspoken.

Every family has its missing persons. Here is their story.