Adoption home records could 'unlock' missing history

A woman whose baby was taken from her in a forced adoption aged 16 has said important questions about the UK's mother-and-baby homes remain unanswered, including how many children were buried in unmarked graves.

Diana DeFries, who successfully campaigned for a state apology for forced adoptions, said greater access to records could help families understand what happened in the homes.

And historian Dr Michael Lambert, from Lancaster University, argued that archives held privately by religious congregations could help "unlock" important pieces of history.

DeFries, originally from London, was sent by her family to Nazareth House in Southampton in 1974 after becoming pregnant.

"I remember the feeling of walking into somewhere that would change me," she said.

The home, run by the Catholic Sisters of Nazareth, received funding from Southampton social services, as well as fees paid by the families of women who stayed there.

The mother-and-baby wing opened in 1960 and by the time it closed in 1985, local media reported it had housed 1,552 women and girls.

Unmarked graves of children who died in Nazareth Houses, which were then mostly a network of residential care facilities and orphanages run by the Sisters of Nazareth, and in similar institutions operated by other religious orders, have been found in the UK.

Sister Anna Maria Doolan, safeguarding lead for the Sisters of Nazareth, said the order welcomed and supported the government's apology for forced adoptions.

In a statement, Doolan said: "Requests to access information regarding former residents are welcome in line with the archive access policy.

"However, the records are sometimes, sadly, incomplete as the guidelines for keeping records pre-1980 were very different to today's requirements."

After giving birth in hospital and returning to the home, DeFries said she was discouraged from holding her baby to prevent her from bonding.

It was only on the train to the adoption agency in London, accompanied by her mother, that she said she was able to really hold her daughter.

"I didn't want to let her go," she said.

"I kept holding on to the idea that they'd see the truth - they'd realise this was their grandchild, and they'd relent."

She then recalls a woman from the agency wearing a white coat, a stethoscope and a pearl necklace appearing and taking her daughter.

"This woman carried [my daughter] away, turned around and said 'say bye-bye' and waved her little hand at me," she said, "As if this was the most banal thing."

Next week, she was back in school.

"And I have never felt so broken in my entire life."

DeFries met her daughter again in 1992 when she was 18.

"When you first meet the person you lost, there is grief as well as joy, as well of a sense of expectation," she said.

Later, she became the chair of the Movement for an Adoption Apology, which campaigned for the UK government to apologise for forced adoptions. That was delivered in July by then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

It came with a promise of £4m to assist in funding a national online resource, led by charity CoramBAAF with the Archives and Records Association, to help people find out where adoption records are held.

DeFries believes the apology, and funding, will help.

Through requests to the Sisters of Nazareth, she has tried to get her own records, and received a redacted copy of a register that showed she was at the home.

But she has also requested administrative files and financial records, to get a better understanding of how the home operated.

She said the order told her they had been obliged by law to destroy many of the other records she asked for.

She still believes they may exist, and that privately held records like those could help people understand their experiences, or could hold clues to other potential injustices - not only in homes run by the Sisters of Nazareth, but in similar institutions across the UK.

"What hasn't yet been explored here is all the babies who died in the homes, and were buried in unmarked graves, and the women who suffered birth injuries that weren't repaired, and the women who died," she said.

"And the different things that have gone on that are not being explored because they're yet to be properly recognised," she said. "And the records are hidden, or protected."

The Sisters of Nazareth allow requests for both remote enquiries and on-site research, but visits must be approved by the congregation and are supervised.

There are further restrictions around accessing material containing personal information, that is business-sensitive, or has not yet been appraised, according to the congregation's access policy.

Dr Michael Lambert is a historian at Lancaster University who has investigated mother-and-baby homes.

He supported the campaign for an adoption apology by providing evidence from his own research.

Some of that research was carried out with access to the records granted by the relevant diocese.

Lambert said they indicated many more infant deaths in a Church of England home than had previously been revealed.

He argued it was impossible to know what records were and were not held by a particular congregation or order if they controlled who could see them.

"Allowing an independent person come and look and see is important to be able to gauge that," he said.

"Previous experience tells me that these records could be the key to unlocking peoples'... understanding of the history of the homes."

Often, he said, records had been destroyed because they were deemed to contain other peoples' personal information, or because they were bulky.

But on some occasions, he said, he had been told that records run by homes of different religious orders were "destroyed in floods, fires... only for it later to transpire that they have been preserved".

He said private records like this could help unlock important "linked" records.

For example, he said, correspondence between those who ran mother-and-baby homes and local health authorities could help women learn whether they were given the carcinogenic lactation suppressant Diethylstilbestrol, which was used widely across the NHS until the 1970s, after giving birth.

The Sisters of Nazareth told the BBC that there was no correspondence in its archive, but that research was being carried out on materials held in the National Archives relating to Nazareth Houses, and it believed there were "probably records of this kind held there."