'The century of foundlings'—what Cynthia found when she went looking maternal family secrets
4/13/202652 min
Writer Cynthia Banham on discovering the shocking truth about her great-grandmother, reckoning with buried family secrets, and the criticisms mothers face from others and sometimes most harshly, from themselves.
Cynthia Banham grew up hearing the story of her great-grandmother, Natalina, who had supposedly been orphaned in Italy in the 19th century.
But when Cynthia became a mother herself she felt compelled to look for the real story of her maternal line, which suddenly stopped three generations back.
What she found shocked her -- a period of time when infant relinquishment was so common, the era became known as the 'century of foundlings', and her great-grandmother was one of them.
She had not been orphaned, as the family thought, but abandoned by a nameless mother.
Cynthia took off to Bologna, Italy with her own young family in tow to find the truth. Along the way she uncovered the stories of 'bastardini' (a home for bastards), literate midwives, epigenetics and possible incest.
Cynthia also stood in the house where Natalina was born, and came to terms with her own harsh judgement of herself as a mother.
Mother Shadow is published by Upswell.
Richard also spoke to Cynthia in 2023 about surviving the 2007 Garuda plane disaster in Indonesia.
This episode of Conversations was produced by Meggie Morris. Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison.
It explores ancestry, epigenetics, anthropology, family history, writing, books, orphans, adoption, child abandonment, truth, journalism, parenting with a disability, mothers in wheelchairs, self confidence as a mother, self criticism as a mother, marriage, love, mothers and sons, school communities, Indonesia, Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, memoir, modern history, travel, family bonding, wild gardening.
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First 90 secondsRichard Fidler· Host0:00
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. For centuries, there were these institutions in Italian cities set up by the church to receive foundlings, the children of unmarried mothers. These buildings used to have these little cylindrical portals that were built right into the wall. They were like these little rotating timber capsules where the infant could be placed anonymously by a parent or a midwife. Cynthia Banham is back on Conversations today. Cynthia is Italian on her mother's side, and one day she discovered that her great-grandmother, Natalina, had been one of those foundlings, deposited not long after her birth, way back in the year eighteen ninety-eight. The records showed that Natalina was admitted as, quote, "A child of nobody." Now, Cynthia is a mother herself, and so she wondered how could Natalina's mother just give up her baby like that? And this touched on her own powerful and complicated feelings about motherhood, which she's had to negotiate mostly from a wheelchair. Cynthia is a survivor of the catastrophic Air Garuda incident of two thousand and seven that resulted in the loss of her legs, and we talked about that last time she was here on Conversations. Motherhood was very hard-won