The Stigma of being illegitimate & female in 1800

[marcie dean]

I would agreewith that in part I am one of those whose parents were not married, luckily it did not have the samr effect upon me as it did on my nan because I had a loving family around me, she had her mother whodid nor show real affection and her father did not want to know for appearance sake but his brother Thomas took my nan and placed her in a home when the marriage looked as though it was falling apart and her cousins in their finery always put her down and rurned rheir backs on her they had a rolls Royce, cotton bloomers and sik ribbons when my nan was barefoot. and in rags

[Guy Etchells]

Yet going back further and higher up....the bar sinister on a family crest denotes a bastard branch of a family. Also, there were many families who boasted the Fitz on the front of their family name.

Leonie.

Sorry but there is no such thing as a bar sinister, that was an invention by Sir Walter Scott.
The designation  Bend sinister (sinister Latin for left, Dexter for right) merely refers to the direction of the stripe. The french heraldic term for a Bend is Barre.

I should also point out in English Heraldry there is no mark of difference for bastardy.
Cheers
Guy

[tinytears9]

My husband's grandmother was born in January 1900 and her certificate has illegitimate written clearly. However, her father died just before Christmas, on 20th December 1899, aged 39 and left his widow with their three daughters aged 10, 6 and 3 and Margaret arrived three weeks after her father died. As a result, his name was never on her certificate even though she shared the same parents as her sisters. I can only imagine what life was like for the family over Christmas, New Year, and having a baby whilst mourning the loss of your husband and provider. I have not found the family on the 1901 census but I am still investigating. Margaret grew up with a sense of shame because she was classed as an illegitimate child.

[Guy Etchells]

My husband's grandmother was born in January 1900 and her certificate has illegitimate written clearly. However, her father died just before Christmas, on 20th December 1899, aged 39 and left his widow with their three daughters aged 10, 6 and 3 and Margaret arrived three weeks after her father died. As a result, his name was never on her certificate even though she shared the same parents as her sisters. I can only imagine what life was like for the family over Christmas, New Year, and having a baby whilst mourning the loss of your husband and provider. I have not found the family on the 1901 census but I am still investigating. Margaret grew up with a sense of shame because she was classed as an illegitimate child.

If your husband's grandfather was the married & cohabiting with his wife before his death, his death would not make their child illegitimate (assuming they lived in the UK).
There must be some reason why the certificate was marked illegitimate.

Had the husband and wife split up, was the husband working away for instance?
Under UK law the husband is always assumed to be the father of a child unless it can be shown he had no access to the mother during the relative time period.

The correct procedure would be to mark it as a posthumous birth.

Cheers
Guy

[RJ_Paton]

The correct procedure would be to mark it as a posthumous birth.

Cheers
Guy

Firstly , welcome to Rootschat .......

Secondly I agree with Guy, my grandfather's birth certificate from 1899 shows his father as deceased at the time of his birth (my great grandfather died from blood poisoning 2 months before the birth)

[coombs]

I did hear that illegitimacy was not so frowned upon in villages than towns. However, in towns it was easier to cover up baseborn children.

I think it could depend on the area and status if illegitimacy was a stigma or not.

[tinytears9]

Thanks for sharing that information. My father in law only remembers how upset his mother was as being labelled as illegitimate. I assumed that since her father wasn't present at the birth, that this was the reason. Up until this point, I had issues tracing my own family tree lines so had put more effort in to my husband's side as that was so much more straight forward. The children were named after grandparents on each side and all appeared to be married prior to the arrival of children. On one line, they were all coal miners and shuffled between streets close to the mines with daughters that married sons of existing miners. Reading up on the history of scottish miners has been interesting and sad as there was no health and safety back then.

Could I upload her birth certificate for you to have a look and see if you can spot something that this novice missed?

[LizzieW]

I wonder if the stigma of illegitimacy accounts for the fact that a paternal g.aunt's illegitimate child remained with her grandparents when her mother moved out and married someone who wasn't the child's father, as did a maternal g.aunt's illegitimate child.  That case was slightly different in that my g.aunt and her boyfriend as he was then, lived in the same house as he was employed by her father.  Although she had the baby, her father refused to let her marry (she was only 17 when she had her baby) because he didn't like the boyfriend.  Her father died soon afterwards and they did marry, although her father was right as my g.aunt became a battered wife - of course in the late 1800s/early 1900s she just put up with it and kept on having more and more children.

[iolaus]

Slightly later but my grandmother had two illegitimate children in the 1920s - neither of them has the word 'illegitimate' on their birth certificate - there is simply a line drawn through the space for the father's details