MARY JO SULLIVAN is one of thousands of people born to an Irish mother but adopted by a couple in the United States.
Mary Jo’s mother, Mary Hughes, got pregnant out of wedlock in the late 1950s. Hughes moved from Dublin to Leeds in England, where she gave birth to Mary Jo.
A couple of months later, Hughes and her daughter moved back to Ireland and ended up in Bessborough mother and baby institution in Cork city.
They stayed there for about three and half years before Mary Jo was adopted by an Irish couple living in the US, Pete and Julia Sullivan.
The Sullivans emigrated from Kerry to the US in the early 1950s, settling in St Louis in Missouri. They couldn’t have biological children so turned to adoption to expand their family – first adopting Margaret, then Mary Jo.
The Sullivans travelled to Ireland to bring Margaret back to the US with them, but couldn’t make the trip a second time when they wanted to adopt Mary Jo. Instead, they made arrangements for their friends – who were travelling to Ireland on their honeymoon – to bring home their new daughter.
“They wanted another child so they adopted me, but they didn’t come back to get me. They had to stay in America with Margaret because she was so young, and they couldn’t afford to come and get me. So they made arrangements with a couple that they knew, who worked with an airline. They came over to Ireland on their honeymoon.
“So they came over on their honeymoon childless and got back to the States with a three-and-a-half-year old. That was quick,” Mary Jo joked.
She had a very happy childhood. She and Margaret were extremely close, and their adoptive parents loved them “unconditionally”, Mary Jo told The Journal.
Despite this, Mary Jo said she always felt a “disconnect” – like something was missing. She visited Bessborough in the 1980s with her adoptive father.
However, she still knew very little about her biological parents or medical history.
“You don’t know who you are, you don’t know who your mother is, you don’t know if you have any brothers and sisters, you don’t know if you look like anybody.
Nobody says, ‘Oh, you have her eyes or her mouth or her nose or her hair’. You know, there’s such a disconnect for your entire life, no matter how much my parents that adopted us loved us – and we were very much taken care of and loved.
“But there’s still a disconnect, always. Because you’re growing up with all these other kids who’ve got brothers and sisters and cousins and family reunions. And you have none of that.”
Mary Jo thought about actively searching for her biological parents over the years but didn’t fully pursue it until her adopted parents both died from cancer.
‘Search angels’
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, adopted people had a new tool in their search to find out family history – Ancestry.com.
“The website was really coming into play back then,” Mary Jo recalled. Around the same time, she made contact with a support group that helped people adopted via the Irish system to find their birth families – the Adopted and Fostered People’s Association of Ireland.
So-called “search angels” from the group helped adopted people find records and information about their birth parents and early life. Mary Jo’s search angel was called Bernadette Joyce.
The two women started to email back and forth, sharing any leads they could find. By this time, Mary Jo had her own children and was particularly interested in getting her health records.
Mary Jo tried to get records from the Catholic charity in St Louis that helped facilitate her adoption, but didn’t have much luck.
“They had hardly anything. And I said, ‘I have a right to know my history, especially my health records. I’m a mother, I’ll be a grandmother soon, they’ll have their own children’. It wasn’t fair, I just couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t allow me to have anything.”
At the same time Bernadette was making inquiries back in Ireland and found out where Mary Jo was born in England, resulting in Mary Jo travelling to Leeds in November 2002.
She saw the church where she was baptised and St Margaret’s, the mother and baby home where she spent her first three months of life. She also got some answers about her early life.
“They did find one piece of paper. And on that little piece of paper, it had dates. It had when I came into St Margaret’s, how long I stayed, where my mother was brought up. I knew nothing of this. It also had phone numbers, where she was when she was in England, how much it cost for me to stay there, and when I was released to go to Dublin.”
Calling people in the phone book
Mary Jo found out that her mother was from Kilnaleck in county Cavan. She faxed the information back to Bernadette, who contacted the priest in Kilnaleck.
“She called the parish priest there. And he said, ‘Oh, yes, I know Mary but she’s married now and her married name is Martin’,” Mary Jo told us.
Becoming emotional, Mary Jo recalled how, after getting this information, she would go through phone books and call anyone by the name of Mary Martin.
I was calling people to find out whether or not they were my mom, but they weren’t. ‘No, we don’t know her’ , ‘no’, ‘no’ was always the response.
In February 2003, there was a major breakthrough: Bernadette found Mary Martin’s contact details. Bernadette called Martin, who initially denied she had a daughter.
“[Bernadette] called my mother, my mother denied that she even knew me first. Then she called again a few weeks later and my mother said yes, she did have a daughter. I guess she had to get over the fact that I was looking for her – finally – after all these years.
When you signed the adoption papers, or they forged your name or whatever, you had to sign an agreement saying you’ll never find [your child], saying you’ll never look her up and she’ll never find you. And that’s the end of it, go on with your life and be done with it and forget about it. Yeah, well, you know that’s impossible.
With Bernadette acting as an intermediary, Mary Jo and her mother exchanged letters. Martin initially seemed excited about reconnecting with her daughter, but eventually said she wasn’t ready to meet.
Martin had married but she and her husband were unable to have children, so she lived alone after he died.
Mary Jo recalled: “She just lost her husband six months prior. She wasn’t over that and didn’t want to have this on her plate too. It really took me aback, I was very upset about that. Because at first she was excited about it, and then she decided ‘no’.
“I wrote a seven-page letter to her, just letting her know I’m not here to hurt her. I’m not here to embarrass her, to expose her to anything. I just needed to know that she was my mother.”
A few letters were exchanged, but Mary Jo needed to know more. Later that year she booked a flight to Ireland. She came over with a group of friends, just days before her 47th birthday.
An unexpected visitor
Mary Jo wanted to meet her mother but knew that attempting to see her came with a huge risk and could end their relationship for good. She weighed up the pros and cons, eventually deciding to go to her mother’s house in Dublin.
“I went down the road and I saw the house. I saw that she was outside, she was pouring hot water on weeds. She went back into the house.
“And I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to do this, this is it, this is now because she may not be there tomorrow’. So I opened up the wrought iron gate and I walked up to the front door. She had a big wooden door with a beautiful, painted glass window.
“Then I knocked on the door. I could see her shadow, I could see her silhouette coming toward me. I just kind of stepped back and she opened the door. She didn’t recognise me, of course, she didn’t know who I was. She just looked at me.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a word in my mouth. And I just said, ‘Are you Mary? Are you Mary Martin?’ And she said, ‘I am’. I told her, ‘I’m Mary Jo, your daughter’.
“Then she just cupped her hands on her face. I thought she was going to put a pot over my head, just going to kill me. But she didn’t – she grabbed me and then we hugged and we cried.
“We went into the parlour. And she just started to apologise. And I said, ‘You have no reason to apologise, you did what you needed to do, or what you were forced to do. I don’t care. I just needed to see you and let you know that what you did was the right thing, I’ve had a lovely life’.”
Mary Jo’s adoptive parents, the Sullivans, had sent Martin photos of Mary Jo over the years and updates about how she was doing. Martin had kept all the photos – including one of Mary Jo and her sister, Margaret.
Mary Jo said the meeting was “surreal” but “lovely”.
“There was no relationship, but there was a love that never went away. There was just a feeling inside our souls.”
Mary Jo said she and her mother “chatted, we had some tea, we just had a lovely conversation”.
“I told her, ‘I just want this to settle in, I won’t keep you out here, but I’m staying at this hotel nearby and if you would like to have a cup of tea or something in the next day or two, that would be great. Just let me know and we’ll chat again and then we’ll figure out where you want to go from here. I left everything in her hands.”
Mary Jo and her mother did indeed meet again before she left Ireland. The pair stayed in touch after Mary Jo went back to St Louis, talking over the phone.
‘My cousin from America’
Martin asked Mary Jo to come back to Ireland a few months later and she did. Mary Jo was delighted with the relationship they were building but disappointed to learn that her mother had been telling people her cousin was visiting, not her daughter.
“Unbeknownst to me, she was introducing me every time I came back as ‘a cousin from America’. She never identified me. She accepted for me to call her mom, but I didn’t when we were around other people.”
Mary Jo reluctantly agreed to be referred to as a ‘cousin’ but eventually told her mother she wanted people to know who she really was.
I didn’t like it. I felt betrayed, I felt dishonoured, I felt she doesn’t want anybody to know. After about three years of that, I said, ‘I can’t come back unless I’m your daughter, I can’t keep doing this’.
“I’m going to say something to somebody by accident and they’re going to absolutely go crazy or you’re going to be embarrassed. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to expose her ‘sin’ or the shame that evidently she was still feeling.”
Mary Jo was a flight attendant at the time and made arrangements for Martin to come to the US.
“She came and I introduced her to her grandchildren, she had three. And then I had two grandchildren of my own which were her great grandchildren, a set of twins.
“I asked, ‘Do you mind if we call ourselves your children, your grandchildren?’ She said ‘absolutely’, she told me: ‘That’s it – I’m going home and I’m telling everybody that I am your mother and you are my daughter’.”
Over the following years, Mary Jo came to Ireland several times and her mother went to the US.
“We were coming back and forth, having a lot of nice visits. I threw a big surprise 75th birthday party for her. And then she started to get sick with cancer.”
They had a close relationship for about 12 years, before Martin sadly died.
Mary Jo knew very little about her father – Martin didn’t want to talk about him and, on one occasion, abruptly told her he was dead. All she had was a name: John Reilly.
After Martin died, new information came to light.
“I was on Ancestry.com and the name Quinn kept coming up on my DNA matches. After I made further inquiries, I found out his name was Thomas Quinn, not John Reilly.”
‘You’re a Quinn’
Mary Jo said she was “very angry” with her mother for giving her the wrong name. But, over time, she realised that Martin herself may have unknowingly had the incorrect name. Either way, she couldn’t ask her anymore.
Through her online research Mary Jo connected with a woman called Mary Quinn, who lived in England and was also looking for her relatives via DNA matches online. This was in 2018 and the two women started to share information over WhatsApp.
After Martin died, Mary Jo found a photo of her mother as a young woman with a man who she believed was her father. She sent this photo to Mary Quinn, who in turn sent it to one of her cousins back in Ireland, Marion O’Donnell, who was researching their family tree.
Marion confirmed that it was indeed Tom Quinn in the photo, Mary Jo’s father.
“It wound up that Marion and Mary were, are, my cousins. Our grandfathers were all brothers. My dad had a massive mess of brothers and a couple of sisters.
“But most of them did go to England, a lot of them didn’t stay [in Ireland]. But my dad would come back to Cavan to see family, and that’s how he and my mom got together.”
Mary Jo, Mary and Marion have been in regular contact since 2018 but, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, were unable to meet – until a few weeks ago.
Mary Jo came back to Ireland in September and, for the first time in her life, was able to meet her cousins.
It was extremely, extremely emotional. But we had talked for so long [over the phone], it was like we knew each other. But to actually be in the same company was an amazing feeling.
“It was the first time someone said to me, ‘You’re one of us’. I’ve never heard that before,” Mary Jo told us, her voice breaking.
“They said, ‘Oh, she’s definitely a Quinn, look at those eyes, look at the nose, look at the hair, you’re small like we are, you’re definitely a Quinn’. I’d never heard that before. In 66 years, I’d never heard those words.”
Sadly, Tom Quinn had issues with alcohol and died in 1991.
While in Ireland last month, Mary Jo and her cousins visited her father’s grave and the house he was born in. She, naturally, still has many questions about her parents but feels a sense of peace in her life since meeting her cousins.
There is an unconditional devotion that I will have from now on. My whole life is going to change, and it’s going to change for my children and for my grandchildren and for my husband. It’s not dark anymore, there is light.
Mary Jo said she doesn’t blame her mother for giving her away, saying she likely had “no choice” given the Ireland and time she was living in.
“I think she knew she couldn’t keep me, but I think she went back and forth (when making a decision). She told me that the nuns got her a job in Dublin. Now I don’t know if that’s true, or what happened.
“But let’s say it is true, so maybe she thought ‘OK, now I can start my life, so maybe I should let her go. At least the people adopting her are Irish, they’ll bring her up the right way’.
“I never blamed her for the adoption, that never occurred to me at all. I was never angry about that, I had a great life.”
Mary Jo knows that her approach of showing up at her mother’s house is not something many adopted people will want to do – but it was the right choice for her and she doesn’t regret it.
For any adopted person searching for their relatives, she would encourage them to keep looking.
“Don’t ever give up, don’t give up on yourself. Your choice is your choice. But if this is something that you really do want to do, deep down in your heart, you’ll find a way to do it.”
Mary Jo plans to visit Ireland again soon, and she has invited her cousins to come to the US. After her recent visit, she said Ireland now feels even more like home.
“It’s still surreal to me, it still hasn’t really sunk in. When I do come back to Ireland, I am so filled with such a passion to be here and to stay here.
“This is where I’m supposed to be. This is where I’m happy. Every time I come here I think, ‘This is my home and it’s beautiful. This feels like home’.”
Under new legislation, as of last month, adopted people can access their birth certificates, medical records and early life information.
The Birth Information and Tracing Act also enables people to access this information if their parent has died, and for access by the next of kin of a child who died in an institution.
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