"BEFORE I even knew what the word meant I walked around saying, I am Maura, I am adopted." Maura's family in the United States never made any secret of her adoption.
As a child, she knew nothing of the near impossibility for unmarried mothers in Ireland at the time of keeping their children.
Nor did she know that it would be impossible for her birth mother to contact her. "In my eyes she wasn't looking for me. I thought in Ireland she could just go someplace and get the information about where I was."
Later when she was told, wrongly, that in Ireland it was the birth mother's responsibility to get in touch, the misinformation "made me feel whoever this woman is she doesn't want to make the contact", she says. "It made it hard to live with for me."
The search began in the early 1980s when Maura's parents made the first of several trips to Ireland hoping to contact her birth mother. They were told nobody knew where the records relating to Castlepollard the convent home where Maura stayed from the age of eight months to 21/2 years had gone after it ceased to be an orphanage.
"They directed my mother to contact one of the nuns who used to work there," says Maura. "My mother contacted her but she said she hadn't the records."
This nun suggested Maura write a letter which she would pass on to a nun in London who might have brought the Castlepollard records with her.
It puzzled Maura that, although the people they contacted over the years said they had no records, various bits and pieces of information were given to her.
This included the untrue "information" that her birth mother was 19 when she was born. Her mother became pregnant at 16 but the misinformation hurt Maura. "When I found out she was 19 it broke my heart that somebody who was 19 didn't keep their child. I was very pleased when I found out Mollie was 16 years old."
Finally she gave up looking. "When I turned 30 I had decided it's never going to happen, I am never going to meet her." That didn't mean she stopped thinking about her birth mother. "Every day it's on your mind. There's always going to be something missing inside you whether birth mother or child."
But 11/2 years later, a social worker who had been helping Mollie found one of Maura's letters, which a nun had sent to the health board office in Tralee.
Like Mollie, she was struck by their cultural differences when they met. "It would have been easier if Mollie was from the US. We would have had more things in common to help us understand each other. It's difficult to figure out who this person is in your life and fit them in. How do you place each other properly?
"It must be the most difficult decision the woman has to make," she says of adoption. "In many circumstances it is showing the greatest love. It's somebody's grief but somebody else's joy."