I’ve no idea who I am af ter my DNA failed to match my ‘family’
AN 80-year-old woman has revealed she was left heartbroken after finally meeting her long-lost ‘family’ – only for a DNA test to confirm they were not her relatives at all.
Eileen Macken, nee Miller, was given a birth certificate by officials when she was 18 years old – having been placed in a mother-and-baby home when she was aged two.
Two years ago, she finally met the people she believed were her birth family. However, following a DNA test last year, she discovered the birth cert she had carried for some 60 years was not hers.
Eileen opened up to RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline yesterday, saying she was ‘devastated beyond belief’ to discover this, having finally found a family who had welcomed her. The mother-of-three said she now has ‘no idea who she is or where she came from’.
Speaking to the Irish Daily Mail last night, Eileen said: ‘In one way I feel relieved that I was able to tell my story so publicly for the first time. But I would love to know who I am or where I came from. I have nothing concrete at all.
‘People say, “What do you want to know for now? You’re 80” – but they don’t know what it’s like not to have a clue who you are.’
Eileen said she was ‘always led to believe I was born in March 1937’, but added that she ‘can’t find a single record that adds up and there seems to be nothing available to me to help me find my identity’. She continued: ‘The birth cert I was given was [a birth date of] August 19, 1937 for a Miller baby and this was the only one that made sense, but it’s not my birth cert at all.’
She had been placed in a mother-and-baby home when she was two-and-a-half years old on Dublin’s North Circular Road. She said: ‘I remember one of the women who worked in the home said to me, “If you grow up to be anything like your mother you will be a wonderful person”. But that is all I was ever told.’
She lived in the home until she was a teenager before being moved to a doctor’s home where she worked as a domestic employee. At 18, she decided she wanted to go to the UK to become a nurse – and so she needed identification.
There were no records in the mother-and-baby home so she was told to go to Dublin’s Custom House where she was given a birth cert. The document said: ‘Baby Miller, born March 1937 at 37 Lower Leeson Street.’
For 60 years Eileen believed these were her correct birth details – and when she began tracing her relatives a few years ago, her research led her to a Miller family in Belfast.
Eileen said that in 2016 she plucked up the courage to ring this family. To confuse matters, the family told her the woman she believed to be her mother had revealed on her death bed that she had a ‘secret she was going to take to the grave’.
‘We all put it together and believed that I was the secret she couldn’t tell anyone about,’ Eileen said. She said she went to visit the family, and that they were ‘absolutely wonderful’.
Last year, the Millers agreed to do a DNA test with Eileen, who insisted on paying the €400 bill.
Eileen recalled: ‘They said they were hoping for good news.’
However, she said that ‘three weeks later it all fell apart… The DNA said “no connection whatsoever”.’
She said. ‘I was devastated. I thought I was going to die.
‘So I don’t know who I am, where I am, where I came from.’
Of her longing to know about her true family, Eileen said: ‘I know well my mother had me out of wedlock, God love her, and even though I never met her I’m loving a woman I’ve never known or seen. I want to put my arms around her and tell her I have no anger or bitterness, [but] I have no idea what happened to her.
‘This is what is hurting me: I don’t know if I was taken from her, or if she died at the time – or if she lived, then when did she eventually die?’
Eileen, married to George for 58 years, said she would be lost without her two daughters and her son. Tragically, the couple lost their son Stephen in 1969, when he was six-and-a-half years old. He had been born with a deformation in his heart.
‘I have lost my mother and my son and I have been an orphan all my life,’ Eileen said. ‘I don’t feel sorry for myself but I would love before I die to know who exactly I am.’
‘Mother had me out of wedlock’