The butterfly

It was bound to happen eventually.

Photo by AARN GIRI on Unsplash

This post is dedicated to the volunteers whom I have the pleasure & honour to work with every day at Project Infant.

I often think of Project Infant as an entity in its own right, it’s no longer a hobby project that I thought I would complete quickly and then subsequently move on to the next thing. It’s something that is undergoing its form of metamorphosis.

Safe to say, that might be a more imaginative way of describing it, but it is the way I see it.

With the release of over 2,300 names from the Pelletstown mother and baby home — it did teach me two things.

1. Perhaps Pelletstown shouldn’t have been done immediately.

2. There are many more institutions to look at.

Let me explain. I do not for one second believe that releasing the names of the Pelletstown home was not beneficial to people wanting to learn more about the people who were there. But, Project Infant has and will always be a venture run by the kindness of amazing volunteers wanting to help. Here’s where point two ties into that. Time is precious, it’s something I’m reminded of every day. Therefore, the last thing I want to be is a source of time wasted for other people as that’ll leave nothing but a sour taste in everyone’s mouths and then nobody’s happy.

I’ll admit it, we may have to look through Dublin North and Dublin South to try and record the names of every child in Dublin North / Dublin South. As big as that task, and I’m not saying that lightly — I’m struggling to figure out a better way. I’ve never organised something on this big of a scale before. It would involve such a widescale search because there are (getting on for) 25 institutions (orphanages, Magdalen Homes, mother and baby homes, county homes, industrial schools etc…) that have operated in Dublin. There are about 700-800 results for deaths of children aged 0 per year. So the last thing we’d need is to keep going over them repeatedly.

Surprised? So was I. A lot of the names came from Peter Higginbotham’s site, childrenshomes.org.uk and some of the ones that I had known about from other sources weren’t a part of that list either.

So, am I beating myself up? Yes. Should I be? Probably, yes. This venture has been both fulfilling and frustrating, just when I think I have a good system organised, I keep seeing how a small change here could make the research method better or maybe that alteration there can improve the organisation system tenfold. But, I also feel a duty. A duty to do what the government never decided to do:

Share. Those. Names.

So, I feel guilty if in my mind, I (to put it plainly) screw up or I don’t have to get something on my end put up fast enough, it is just a hindrance for survivors who deserve the truth as too many things have been delayed.

I say that, as I currently have two (almost three) county homes sitting on my to-do list waiting to be uploaded to the site and another three on the way.

So, I am trying — and I am (sort of) figuring out the best foot forward for Project Infant. I just don’t want to let anyone down in the process.