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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Steven1966 on Saturday 28 November 20 18:32 GMT (UK)
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Hi All
I am currently "helping" a work colleague do their family tree, to be fair the help consists of no more than, me suggesting where they could/should look, and them going away and doing the finding the information for themselves.
However a general question has arisen from all of this. Has anyone come across/heard of an example, where a child is born out of wedlock, the fathers name is missing off the birth certificate, the child takes the mothers maiden name, at a later date the parents marry and the father "adopts" their own child, and the child then takes the father's name.
The names aren't important, but this relates to an area of Wolverhampton in the late 1920's. We are both interested to learn if this sort of thing happened and how common.
Steve
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Where the parents weren't married, the father's name couldn't go on the certificate unless he himself was present and signed the register. If the parents subsequently married, there was no need for the father to adopt the child as it was already his. If the child had gone by his mother's surname before the marriage, it would be perfectly normal for the child to start using the father's surname thereafter.
In Scotland, if a couple were free to marry when they had a child out of wedlock, their subsequent marriage removes the illegitimacy from the child.
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Hi Steve,
Yes this was standard practice.
In a nutshell: In the scenario you mention if only the "new mother" adopted the child then the natural father would lose parental control.
I dealt with many such cases when I worked for the local authority.
Fisherman
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Thank you both for the replies.
My colleague and I were discussing the possible reason for their male relatives, father's name missing of the birth certificate.
The child took the mothers maiden name as a surname. The mother later married (thought likely to the real father of the child). The child ended up with a double barrelled surname (mothers maiden surname and the mothers new husband's surname). Later in life the now adult child "dropped" the first part of their surname (mothers maiden name).
The phrase "adopted" has been used as a way of explaining the change of surname for the child and lack of a father on the birth certificate. We of course had to consider that the mother really didn't know who the father was, but it is thought possible they weren't married or living together at the time the child was born.
Steve
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Because no father was named on the birth certificate the child would be registered under the mothers name.
When she later married whether it was the child's natural father or not they would both have to adopt so that they had shared parental rights and the child's birth record amended to reflect the new surname
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If the father's name had been on the certificate and they had subsequently married the birth has to be re-registered.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/application-to-re-register-a-childs-birth-following-marriage-of-natural-parents
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Thank you all, that answers our joint question. I will pass on what you have all said to my colleague.
Steve
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Steve,
With reference to your enquiry:
"Has anyone come across/heard of an example, where a child is born out of wedlock, the fathers name is missing off the birth certificate, the child takes the mothers maiden name, at a later date the parents marry and the father "adopts" their own child, and the child then takes the father's name."
Hopefully this may help:
When my older brother was born in September 1945 his (our) parents were not married and so his given birth surname was that of our mother.
However, after they married in April 1947, one of the first things that they did was to go to their local juvenile court (in Shrewsbury) to jointly formally adopt their first child. Thereafter he carried his father’s surname.
Although both he & I were not made aware of this by our mother until shortly after our father's death, I still took a certain vicarious pleasure in pointing out to him that he had appeared in court at such an early age.
By the way, this is not anecdotal as I still retain a photocopy of the relevant court document - having passed the original on to my brother.
Willyam
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Willyam
Thank you for this, I will pass this onto to my colleague.
Steve
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My grandmother was born 2 years before her mother married, so no father's name appears on the birth certificate. We do not know, however, whether the man her mother married was in fact Gran's actual father. All we know was that on her marriage certificate the space for father's name was filled with the surname of both her mother and her father/stepfather, so for example John Smith (his name) Brown (mother's surname). She did, however, always say that her maiden name was Brown.