‘Decades later, I have no birth cert
ONE woman whose birth certificate was falsified – and who is still struggling to get information about her birth family is Maria Dumbell, 68, who is now living in Liverpool.
Maria, pictured opposite page as a child, was illegally adopted and has spent decades trying to fight for records held by adoption agencies in Ireland to be made public. After searching since she was a teenager for her real birth certificate, Maria still hasn’t made any headway.
She feels she could be one of the 126, and doesn’t hold out much hope.
Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, she said: ‘I have letters going back to the 70s, but have got nowhere. I’ve got a baptism cert in my foster parents’ name. It’s lies because it has “mother” down as the woman who fostered me and “father” down as her husband. It’s not real.’
When Maria was 16 and attempting to apply for a passport, she went to track down her birth certificate at the Custom House, where such records were held at the time. It then came to light that she would have been registered under her birth name – which she has no knowledge of and no way of sourcing.
It wasn’t until she was 37 years old that she was able to get a passport – following an arduous process where she was bizarrely asked to register her own birth by the Irish State.
Maria recalls: ‘They sent me the form to do it. They also said I had to get somebody to say they were a witness to my birth and a lawyer to