Politics is also the recognition of truth. After decades of silence, humiliation, and stigmatization, this Thursday the British government has officially apologized to the tens of thousands of women who, between the late 1940s and early 1970s, were forced to give up their children for adoption simply because they were unmarried.

Eleven years after local historian Catherine Corless revealed that 796 infants and children died between 1925 and 1961 at the Tuam Mother and Baby Institution in Galway, Ireland, the forensic excavation of the site formally began this Monday. The process, expected to last two years, aims to locate, exhume, analyze, and—if possible—identify the human remains buried at the site, as well as to dignify them with a new burial and a permanent memorial.