I Knew You Were There: A Stolen Child's Search for Her Irish Mother, (Hardcover)

Out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a mortal sin in 1950s Ireland, where unwed pregnant girls were confined to notorious mother-baby homes.

There, nuns forced the girls to work fourteen-hour days and denied them medication to ease the pain of childbirth. When the babies were born, their mothers returned to working in hopes to take their children home, but the cruel church and Irish government sold the infants to wealthy American and European families.

Marie O'Leary Wydra was one of those children. Adopted into her own hellish nightmare at age two, she never gave up hope that one day she would meet her birth mother again. Decades later, with her daughter Megan at her side, Marie set out to find her Irish mother.

I Knew You Were There is the story of two daughters: one who always longed to meet her mother, and the other whose love for her mother and Ireland sends them on a journey they never dreamed of.