Orphan traces her roots to Breffni county

Sixty-year search ends at Cavan Calling

After six decades of searching for her family, a Dublin born woman finally reconnected with her relatives at Cavan Calling.

Katherine Greenhough Olwill (81) was beaming after the emotional meeting.

“It was such a lovely time. When I was with my family, I felt a sense of peace. They were all very caring and made me feel very special. I met second cousins and their families on both my mother and father’s side of the family,” she told the Celt.

Katherine was born in a nursing home on South Circular Road in Dublin in 1942. However her parents gave her up and she was left orphaned.

She was fostered into a family. However this experience was cut short when, at the age of just two years, her foster mother tragically died.

Katherine was returned to the nursing home before being transferred to St Joseph's Industrial School, Summerhill, outside Athlone.

Speaking of her time here, Katherine said: “I lived at Summer Hill from the age of two and my memories are of my having no one to call family, no one visiting me, no one sending me letters, cards or parcels.

“It was a harsh childhood with very little love; not many happy times at all other than friendships I made with the other girls living with me. Food was scarce and we shared our belongings including clothes. We knew work from a very early age.”

Katherine explained the pain she felt watching her friends leaving the school to spend holidays at home.

“Some children went home to visit their families during the holidays but I stayed at Summerhill as I had no one to go to,” recalls Katherine, her heart still aching from the experience.

She spent the next 16 years of her life in the school.

Later in life, Katherine found out her foster brothers and sister initially visited her at the nursing home as they missed her terribly. However, they were later told not to worry she had gone to a ‘good home’.

At the age of 22 years, Katherine left Ireland to forge a new life in England where she completed nursing training and spent the next 50 years plus working as a nurse for the National Health Service (NHS).

Here she got married and had two children, a boy and a girl.

“Very sadly my mother became a widow in 2005 when my father died from cancer at the young age of 57,” her daughter Julie takes up the story.

She explained that, while her mother was left heartbroken not knowing who her family was, she also faced many practical difficulties due to her anonymous past.

“Over the years my mum has come across many challenges including not been registered at birth, not having the correct surname, personal information being ‘lost’ and agencies failing her but, despite this, she remained focused on trying to find her identity, and this has spurred her on throughout this journey.”

Katherine tried tirelessly to seek out her family, contacting various agencies and even paying for a private investigator, but to no avail. She finally gave up hope of ever finding her roots.

That is until recently when Julie found some information, which reignited the search.

“In 2020, I decided to do my DNA through ancestry.com and found several relatives - second and third cousins,” explains Julie.

“We were lucky enough to find a distant family member in America who had begun to trace her family roots and put us in contact with a second cousin in Cavan.

“As the pieces of the jigsaw came together, we discovered more family members and despite missing pieces we were able to establish my mum's parents who died in the 1980/1990s.”

Katherine and Julie made arrangements with their newfound family to meet them during Cavan Calling, a festival with the sole focus of bringing people from the area back together.

“As a family, we celebrated with over 60 members of the extended family in Cavan to coincide with the Cavan Calling. We were invited to visit Cavan, Corraweelis, as soon as we found family via ancestry.com, and first visited my second cousins in 2020 just after the Covid restrictions were lifted,” says Katherine happily.

She explained distant relatives from Ireland, America, England and Scotland all made the effort to meet them during the festival weekend.

“This was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, I was unable to find immediate family such as brothers and sisters etc but have found second, third cousins and their families in Ireland and America. They were all very loving and caring.”

Since reconnecting with her roots, Katherine makes the effort to visit each year.

She concluded to say how glad she is to have people around her that she can finally call her family.

“We talk regularly and I visit each year with my family. I felt connected knowing I had someone - a family and a history of who I am after years of never knowing. I felt whole.”

f you have any information on Katherine’s closer family members, please contact this newspaper in confidence.