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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: cynmac on Friday 19 October 12 18:36 BST (UK)
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Hello List
I am researching a baby b 1920 in a Workhouse. The Mother is married but no Father is given on the birth cert although the child's surname is subsequently the same as the Mother's husband.
My Question is ... would the Father's name be omitted if he was not present , or working in a different part of the country and could the child be known by his surname officially without his permission. I am trying to find if he was really the unnamed Father.
Any thoughts ??
Cynmac
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The Registration Act of 1874 states:
"The putative father of an illegitimate child cannot be required as father to give information respecting the birth. The name, surname and occupation of the putative father of an illegitimate child must not be entered except at the joint request of the father and mother; in which case both the father and mother must sign the entry as informants" The Act came into force on 1st January 1875.
Stan
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However a child of a marriage cannot be illegitimate. The legal presumption is that a child born to a married woman is a child of her husband, even if that is not actually the case.
Stan
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Thanks for your input Stan. So the baby would carry the Mother's married name as a matter of course.
Cynmac
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So what if the Mother's husband was the bio father, Could there be a reason he wasn't named on the Birth Cert ?? What if he was working away ?? Could the Mother name her husband as the father or would he have to be present at the registration.
Cynmac
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The father only had to be present if the child was illegitimate.
Stan
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Nowadays there is a separate space for the child's surname, but this wasn't the case back then. The child would therefore take the surname of the father (if named) or, if no father is named (as in this case), of the mother. The mother's married name was her legal name at that time and therefore the child's name too, however I wouldn't assume for a moment that means the father would be her husband. Given that he isn't named, I would strongly suspect that he isn't.
Ermy
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Thanks for both replies. The Father will now remain a mystery.
Cynmac
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Where did the certificate come from? There's always the possibility of clerical error.
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Do you know where the father was, during the pregnancy?
Years ago, we obtained a BC for one of my grandmother's siblings.
It showed no father. We queried this with the RG who said none was named.
subsequently found out that the 'father' we thought it should be, had been in gaol for 2 years until a month prior to the birth! Obviously the local Clerk of the Court knew he wasn't the father and refused to say that he was (smallish country town in NSW) ;D ;D ;D
at least it cleared up our confusion re the omission on the BC ;D ;D
Dawn M
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Just wondering if I could add my question to this thread:
It concerns a birth registered in 1932 in London. The person whose birth it is , is still alive so I shall not use the real names.
The cert. has the mother's name with her former name, implying she was married but the space for father's name is blank.
eg: mother's name: jane smith, formerly jones.( not real names)
child's name is smith.( not real name)
Do we assume that Mr Smith was the father, though un-named?
Do we assume Mr Smith was dead?
Do we assume jane was still married but living with another man?
Would a live legitimate father and husband ever be omitted from a birth cert?
All comments welcome.
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Bykerlads, I was once told "Assume nothing, check everything"
:P :P :P :P
Dawn M
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Further to my original post, we do not know where the Mother's husband was during the pregnancy . The family had been living in Wales but the birth took place in Somerset.
which could mean either that the husband was tied to work in Wales or the Mother was 'sent away' to give birth . Because we had assumed he was working in Wales caused me to think that if he could not be at the registration he may not be named on the cert. The actual informant of the birth was the Workhouse master who may not have known the Father's name. The only explanation we could come up with was that because he was not present he was not named, but if this was not the case it has become a brick wall.
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I have a marriage cert. relating to one of my forebears which has in father's name column "nullius filius" meaning I believe in latin; Father unknown..Everyone in the village at the time knew who the father was. So why not name him?
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I had a similar illegitimate born child , you would have better luck looking in a Church confessional or Kirk sessions from the local church ? that is where I found mine , and he did keep the fathers name until his mother remarried . Don't know if it will help , but its worth a try ?
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Hello all,i feel i must comment on this, as i obtained my own fathers birth cert from Belfast reg office.no father named also gran's maiden name is not on there,she married in 1901 but according to relatives he left about 1910 never came back.Gran is a widow on Irish census in 1911.Dad was born in 1917.I would welcome comments as to this mystery it leaves me a brick wall i would dearly like to clear up.regards tobyma123. :(
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I have a few births like this in my research and I quote one example.
My great grandfather's sister was married in 1890 and then had a daughter registered to her and her husband later that year (father / mother both on birth certificate).
Two years later, that mother then has a child registered to her by her stepmother (my great great grandfather's 2nd wife but not the bio mother of the mother in question), and although she was still married, there is no father listed on the birth certificate. All her subsequent children 2 years later and after had a father and mother listed, strange.
My ancestors made false declarations at births of illegitimate children and from my own research I have discovered that the child registered without a father was not born to the married mother as listed on the birth certificate but to her younger 17 year old sister (she was not named), that younger sister had another illigitimate child a few years later that had to be registered to her as there were no more female "volunteers" to have the birth registered to them as pregnancies overlapped. I even doubt if my great grandfather's sister knew that the birth had been attributed to her.
Now jump forward to the 1940's and my late mother kept from me the fact she had a child before marriage to my father, but you won't find that birth registered to my mother, that child was given away to married relations and then registered as their own child away from the district where the birth occurred. Then my mum had another child after me (although still married to dad but he was not the father as they had temporarily split) and that child was also given away to other married relations and the birth registered in the same way, before my dad came back on the scene
In my view a birth certificate is not worth the paper it is written on, and I have many cases in my research all backed up with certificates and information from people who knew what had happened, but there also are a few people still alive who will not say a word.
And to cap it all, illegitimate children of one family were married off to illegitimate children of other non related families.
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Hercule Poirot,thank you so much for your reply.That's the trouble all the people who could tell me have died.Because gran did needlework for (the big houses)so relatives tell me,they feel she was taken advantage of?,by the other servants or the owner.However she did have two younger sisters close in age,so you might well be right.The trouble as well is that baptism's also tell you nothing.I have relatives with a child out of wedlock and the baptism just states the mothers name.Thanks again for your interest and maybe something will come to light sometime,it is particulaly hard if it is your father or mother.regards tobyma123. :)
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Hercule - I appreciate you sharing about the children in your tree.
I relate to what you write above because I believe rellies in my tree have done the same thing...
unfortunately not one of mine will say a word.
But thanks for writing - you prove the truth can be found! C
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The truth is there to find, but if a spade is not big enough to find the secrets, hire a JCB.
You have to obtain a lot of certificates of all sorts to find the truth, I have over 900. Then you follow folk through the census and other records. Prior to 1911 I have found that children were being born to single women and then either raised by grandparents or given to married siblings to bring up, at least they kept these children within the family. Between 1891 and 1904 I have found the truth about SIX children. One was raised as a "sister" to my nan and I called her auntie. She was actually my nan's cousin, an illegitimate daughter of my nan's bio dad's sister. Thankfully the family only had 4 women but they caused a lot of headaches using the try before you buy method.
I have a death certificate of one guy and his daughter who registered the death didn't know where her father was born. I couldn't find his birth under his death name, so started searching by christian name and year of birth on the DC. That didn't work and found he was actually registered under the Welsh version of his christian name and he was then proved by BC to be an illigitimate son of a single woman and was raised by his married aunt (sister of birth mother) as an "adopted" son and then assumed the aunt's married surname, bingo.
Things seemed to change after the 1926 Act, illegitimate children were then given away to related family members and registered to those parents so the birth mother got away scot free. I have amassed a pile of supporting documentation but know there are at least a dozen family members still alive in their 80's who will not say a word.
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In the 1911 census my grtgrandparents had an "adopted son" aged about 14 in it.
His surname was not the same as theirs but, after a lot of searching, he looks as if he was the son of married cousins who both died.
My guess is that he was informally adopted, partly because he was the same age as a son my grtgrandparents had lost to typhoid.
Also, I have a friend age 65 who is sure that he is the son of his father's unmarried sister. Noone ever said anything to confirm this but he looks very like her, she was very close to him, financed his education,left him all her money, and his only "sibling" was 15 years older than him.Iwould have been relatively easy, he thinks, perhaps with the connivance of a private doctor, to pass him off as the baby of his real mother's brother and sister-in-law.
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In the 1911 census my grtgrandparents had an "adopted son" aged about 14 in it.
His surname was not the same as theirs but, after a lot of searching, he looks as if he was the son of married cousins who both died.
My guess is that he was informally adopted
I suspect that wasn't an unusual situation. My grandmother's parents both died in the 1890s when she was very young. She appears in the 1901 census with an apparently unrelated family, described as "adopted".
The mystery wasn't solved until the 1911 census was released - there she was with the same family, but now described as "niece". And indeed it transpired that the "adoptive mother" was her aunt (father's sister). We had, of course, got the adoptive parents' marriage certificate, but for reasons of her own the bride had given a false surname ::) so it wasn't obvious who she was.
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If there is no father on a birth certificate, dating from between 1900 and 1912, is there any way at all of tracing who the father was. There are no surviving family members to ask. I had a great grandmother who had 4 illigitimate children in the early part of the last century. The father has never been traced and I am assuming that this information has gone to the grave with the people who knew.
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Hi Johnny Wizz and welcome
Would think that you are spot on with your assumption.
My dad's family have the usual sprinkling of illegitimate children who have grown up being looked after by various other family members, not their own mother; or the mother has married and the family has generally assumed or, as my dad put it, 'it was generally felt that' , the husband was the father of the children born before the two married.
But even with one of his older sisters, the family were not told but 'it was generally felt that' the guy she married was the father of her first child who was actually brought up as being her youngest sister! It wasn't until I started doing the FH research that I discovered this youngest sister was not my aunt at all, but my cousin!
Dawn M
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Thanks Dawn for such a quick response
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We have a photo in the hall of a group of people with a little girl standing in the front. Those who look at it casually assume it is our daughter because she looked exactly like that as a child, but in fact the people in it are OH's father, uncle, aunt and grandmother outside Buckingham Palace when my FiL was presented with the DSM during WW2. The girl is a mystery. We think she was the natural daughter of OH's aunt, brought up by some cousins and given their name, but cannot know for sure. The only person alive (until recently) who knew the truth was OH's aunt, and she would never say, so we shall probably never know.
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Things seemed to change after the 1926 Act, illegitimate children were then given away to related family members and registered to those parents so the birth mother got away scot free.
Interesting you should say that, I hadn't heard of that before.
I know of someone born after 1926 to an unmarried mother, they were brought up by related family members believing they were the true parents, but the birth had still actually been registered to the natural mother.
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I know of someone born after 1926 to an unmarried mother, they were brought up by related family members believing they were the true parents, but the birth had still actually been registered to the natural mother.
That happened in the case of my aunt who was really my cousin.
On her marriage certificate, she gave her parents as being the same as my Dad's. But when I got her birth certificate - which I got because as the youngest, her b.c. would have all the older siblings listed (NSW, Aust.) - her mother was shown as Dad's sister, no father acknowledged.
Dawn M
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Hello All
My Grandfather has "Illegitimate" on his BC. He was the youngest of eight children by Sarah, she seems to be a very interesting lady. Four children born to her husband, the next three all have a caveat on their BC which says;
" Sarah Dempster wife of John Hutchison. Declares for the purposes of this record, that he is not the father of this child, further that she has had 'no' personal relationship with him since they ceased to live together around the 20th March 1882."
At the time of my Grandads birth they had a lodger, one Archibald McLuskey, (1901 Census) a miner from Ayrshire. Always wondered if he is in fact, my biological Grandparent?
There is a chance if she claimed "parish" that she would have had to declare the father, but have not got there yet.
Seems lots of us have the proverbial skeleton in the cubboard?
Alan H
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I have noticed on numerous occasions when viewing census entries, that women shown as being in their fifties and sixties have children at the address given as sons or daughters...Aged under five..Also at the address is often a teenger as single..Seems a bit dodgy! Regards Phil
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Someone transcribing Northants PRs for FreeReg was asking for help with an entry which was deciphered as 'Bastard child of Anne Gibbard, wife of Wm Gibbard, the said William being abroad with his regiment 4 or 5 years'
Naughty Mrs Gibbard!
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We have recently discovered that my husband has an older brother, apparently adopted out in late 1943. His birth was registered at Derby, mothers married name given as his surname although her first husband had died 2 years previously, and her correct maiden name given. His first names were a reversal of the suspected father's names. Any ideas as to how we might find this long lost brother? What adoption agencies were around then?
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As he may very well be still alive, I recommend you try solely because they have a special part for Sensitive Research which does not show up on search engines.
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Thanks very much indeed for the reply. We will give anything a go. By the way, love the pic of Georgiana. Regards Alison