'No marker, nothing': Unmarked mass graves cause anguish for thousands in Northern Ireland

Jim Chambers will never forget the splash the box containing his stillborn baby made when it hit the mud. It was March 1957, and while his wife, Kathleen, lay in the hospital recovering from a traumatic labor, Jim and his father-in-law had taken his son to be buried. When he arrived at the bog at the bottom of Milltown Cemetery, a gravedigger took the box from him and threw it into a large pit, then carried on digging.

Finding the grave later would prove impossible.

“We didn’t know where to look,” Kathleen Chambers said. “There was no marker, nothing, and nobody talked about it. When I tried to talk about it, it was pushed aside. I was told ‘You’re a young woman, you’ll have more babies.’”