Catherine Corless
The woman who forced the state to dig up the Tuam home was not a professional historian. Catherine Corless was born Farrell in Tuam in 1954, worked as a secretary in a textile factory, married Aidan Corless in 1978 and gave up work to raise four children. An evening course in local history led to an article on landlords for the Old Tuam Society's journal; the editors asked for another, and her memories of the children from the Home who sat in her classroom decided the subject.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
ClintMalpaso, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Tuam High Cross on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Finding the names
In libraries, churches and council offices she traced the children who had died in the home and found death certificates for 796 but no burial records. She had learned along the way that her own mother had been born outside marriage. Wanting money for a proper memorial, she went to local newspapers in 2013 and got a small piece; the Connacht Tribune ran more in February 2014, and by June the story had gone around the world. Some neighbours told her to leave the bodies where they were and drop it; she did not.
Afterwards
The 2017 test excavation proved her right. She received the Bar Council's Human Rights Award that year and said the ideal would be to exhume the children and rebury them with dignity in the main Tuam graveyard; the full excavation began in July 2025. Monica Dolan played her in the 2026 film The Lost Children of Tuam, which she co-produced. The Tuam Mother and Baby Home guide on this site tells the whole story, and the model on this page pins the town.
Questions people ask
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Written from Wikipedia, "Catherine Corless" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.