I was a Tuam baby adopted out to America – sadly my mother died before I could find her

He had a happy childhood in the US but Mikey Greene couldn’t give up until he found his birth family

IN LATE 2015, Mikey Greene touched Irish soil for the first time in 60 years as his plane landed at Shannon Airport. As he walked into the arrivals hall, he was surprised and delighted to see relatives cheering, waving tricolours and brandishing family pictures. What made the moment so special for Mikey was the fact he had never met any of these people before. In fact, he didn’t even know most of them existed.

Mikey’s trip was the result of a frustrating 15-year endeavour — through dead ends, scams and fear of rejection — to find his mother. She had given birth to him at Regional Hospital Galway before they were moved to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, where they lived for the next four years.

Finally, after years of fruitless searching, Mikey uncovered his roots and was reunited with his family — though sadly not his mother, who had died a few years earlier.

Mikey was born in 1951 and at the age of four was adopted by Frank Greene, an Englishman, and his Irish-American wife Katherine. The couple took him to live with them in New York.

Mikey knew from a young age that he was adopted. His adoptive parents sat him down and told him everything they knew.

‘I knew from a young age,’ he says. ‘My parents had good records from the home in Tuam, the church in New York [which arranged the adoption] and bills for my travel. They said they would never have a problem if I ever wanted to try and find my birth mom.’

But as he explains, when you’re young, these types of things don’t play on your mind all that much.

‘I never followed through. It didn’t feel important at that time and age. I did on and off through life wonder if I had brothers and sisters but as a kid, life was good. We were a family.’

Talking to Mikey, one gets a clear sense of his relationship with his adoptive parents and the happy life he had with them.

‘Mom and Dad were good people,’ he says. ‘They gave me a good life.’

Mikey’s dad Frank, ‘a tower of a man’, was from England and was a policeman for a time before moving to the States and joining the army. His mother Katherine was in the Red Cross, and Mikey thinks that’s how they met.

After that, Frank went to work in an aircraft plant, and Katherine became a stay-at-home mother. Frank was Anglican but had to convert to Catholicism before they were allowed to adopt Mikey

The family moved from New York to Florida when Mikey was 12, and he’s lived there ever since. He hated school, but after a few odd jobs when he left high school, he eventually found work in the postal service, and worked out of the same post office his whole career until his retirement six years ago.

It’s a career choice that seems to run in his natural family.

‘I noticed last time I was over in Ireland, that there’s three or four cousins that work for the post office over there. It’s great to be able to trade work stories.’

Frank and Katherine were married for 46 years, and passed away within four months of each other in 1984. Their deaths had a profound effect on Mikey.

‘It was a real low in my life, until I finally got over it, and moved on. They were my two best friends, always there for me.’

Throughout his life, Mikey would often wonder about his birth mother, how her life had turned out, and if he had any brothers or sisters. So in 2001, when he was 50, Mikey decided that he would try to track her down.

He already had some information to go on as his adoptive parents had the records from Tuam, so he knew his birth mother’s name and his own birth name. But he didn’t really know where to start — or how.

It was a difficult journey. When he came across new information, it was in bits and pieces, and as a result, the search was always inconsistent. He would be forced to leave it aside from time to time, and then pick it up again later.

‘This would go on for years,’ Mikey explains.

On top of that, he would occasionally come across false information, incorrect stories and what he calls ‘scams’, which would discourage him and cause him to put it away for a while. At one stage, he was led to believe that he was one of seven children and was then left searching for brothers and sisters that, as he knows now, he never had.

At another point, he was told that documents relevant to his case were sealed in Dublin Castle and he would have to come to Ireland personally to see them.

Because most of the information he was getting was from online forums, it was impossible to tell what was real from what was false.

Then somebody told him that if his mother had other children, perhaps her surname would have changed through marriage, and he may be looking for the wrong person, causing Mikey to leave it aside again.

At another stage, he read on a website about people in his situation who, when they found their families,

‘As a kid, life was good, we were a family’