Family still looking for teen girl's grave 100 years after death in Galway school

She was only 13 years old

Published 20th Aug 2026, 17:43 BST Updated 21st Aug 2026, 17:43 BST Mary Corrigan's family wants to know where she was buried after death in St Bridget's Industrial School in Loughrea. | Local She was only 13 years old Sign up to our Connacht Tribune Today daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know you can manage your profile, and explore all of the available newsletters from Connacht Tribune within your account.

In 1911, six-year-old Mary Corrigan was brought before the courts and committed to St Bridget’s Industrial School in Loughrea for ‘want of proper guardianship’. She was ordered to remain there until January 3, 1921.

The admission register described Mary as three feet tall, slight, with a fair complexion, blue eyes and a short nose. Her general health was recorded as ‘good’.

She died on November 1, 1918, from influenza and pneumonia. She was 13 years old.

More than a century after her death , her niece Anna Corrigan is still no closer to finding out where her teenage aunt was buried.

The 70-year-old, whose own two brothers were residents of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, believes families should not be left searching for the remains and records of children who died while in the care of Church and State institutions.

“The onus should not be on us,” she says. “They were in the care of Church and State.”

Anna, who is PRO of the Tuam Babies Family Group, has spent years trying to piece together the short life of an aunt she never knew.

“Their mother died from TB. I have the court documents to show the children were taken and sentenced to ten years each in an industrial school. I knew my uncle John, I knew my father and I found out that Mary was dead.”

The surviving records tell her a remarkable amount about the little girl who was sent from Dublin to Loughrea into the care of the Sisters of Mercy.

They record her appearance, health and conduct, when she entered the institution and when and how she died.

The 1911 Census shows the six-year-old living in Mountjoy Square in Dublin with her father John Corrigan, a 38-year-old widower who worked as a tailor, her seven-year-old brother William and her aunt Maria Healy, a tailoress.

Annie Corrigan died when daughter Mary was an infant | Local Later that year, Mary came before the courts and was committed to institutional care for “want of proper guardianship”.

According to Anna, an application for her admission to an institution run by the Sisters of Charity in Dublin was withdrawn and she was instead sent to Loughrea.

She was admitted to St Bridget’s Industrial School for Girls on October 14, 1911.

On October 25, less than two weeks after her arrival, Mary was described as ‘a good child’.

Another assessment described her conduct as ‘very satisfactory’.

While Anna can trace much of her aunt’s life through the surviving documentation, there is no confirmed burial place.

It is the absence of that final piece of information which has driven her search.

“I was checking up about Mary, my father and his brother,” Anna explains.

Originally, no first name was entered in the name field of Mary’s birth registration, although she appears as Mary in the 1911 Census and subsequent court and institutional records.

Other records and family documentation refer to her as Mollie or Maura, variations Anna has had to navigate while attempting to trace what happened to her aunt.

She has written to authorities and religious bodies and travelled to Loughrea herself looking for answers.

“I did go down to Loughrea and managed to see a nun who was 92,” Anna explains.

“However, she didn’t work in the industrial school. They have a graveyard but it turned out to be for the nuns. I asked her were the children buried there and she said ‘no’. I have been unable to confirm a burial place for my aunt.”

For Anna, the absence is difficult to reconcile with the detailed records which survive from Mary’s years in institutional care.

Anna’s efforts to find her aunt’s burial place can be traced back at least a decade.

Anna Corrigan, Mary's niece, remains determined to find the truth | Local In correspondence with the Heritage Council in September 2016, she was already seeking information which she hoped might help establish where Mary was buried.

She requested records relating to a €2,000 Local Heritage Grant awarded in 2005 to Loughrea Environmental Group for an archaeological survey and proposed restoration works at a children’s burial ground in Loughrea.

“Despite all of my efforts, I have been unable to find her place of interment,” Anna wrote at the time.

She followed up with the Heritage Council again in February 2017 seeking the information.

Almost a decade after that correspondence, Mary’s burial place remains unknown.

Anna’s determination to find her aunt has another deeply personal dimension.

As a young girl, Anna remembers walking into the kitchen while her mother and uncle were having a disagreement, or as she says, a ‘to-do’.

During the exchange, her uncle made reference to her mother having had two other children.

For years Anna wondered whether she had misunderstood what was said, or even whether the memory was real.

It was only through research much later that she discovered her mother, Bridget Dolan, had indeed had two sons before Anna was born.

Both had been residents of St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.

Her brother John Desmond Dolan was born on February 22, 1946. He died while a resident of the Tuam home on June 11, 1947, before he was 18 months old.

Anna has obtained an inspection report relating to John which she says raises serious questions for her about the condition of the little boy before his death.

The record describes him as emaciated, with no control over his bodily functions and with a ‘voracious appetite’.

Anna says John had been born healthy but was recorded as having died from measles.

She does not accept that measles adequately explains her brother’s death, but she has been unable to obtain medical records, which might provide further answers about his condition and treatment.

Her other brother, William Joseph Dolan, was born on April 20, 1950 and was also a resident of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

Anna has been unable to locate a death certificate or establish a cause of death for William, although an institutional ledger records that he died at around seven or eight months old.

“You can write what you like in a book,” she says, “You need the legal documentation. I don’t believe that William is dead.”

According to documentation, all information regarding him was handed to the Local Authority - Galway County Council – when St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home closed.

In 2013, she reported her brother as a missing person to Gardaí and he is now registered as having “disappeared”.

The discovery that she had two brothers she had never known drew Anna more deeply into the history of the Tuam home.

Today, as PRO of the Tuam Babies Family Group, she is among the relatives seeking answers about children who died or disappeared after entering institutional care.

But her search for Mary has taken her back to an earlier generation and another Galway institution.

Across two generations of one family, Anna has been left searching for answers about three children who passed through institutions in County Galway.

She believes those answers should not have to be extracted, piece by piece, by surviving relatives decades later.

“It is not good enough,” she says. “The State should be going to the nuns to find out.”

For Anna, the issue is ultimately about the dignity afforded to children both during their lives and after their deaths.

She describes the institutional system which operated in Ireland as “a big machine that ran on the blood, sweat and tears of innocent women and children”.

More than a century after Mary’s death, Anna still wants to know what happened after the 13-year-old died in Loughrea on November 1, 1918.

“Everyone is entitled to respect in life and death,” she says. “They were denied both.”