No Father on birth cert

[Carmella]

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

[Hercule Poirot]

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.

[bykerlads]

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.

[Sloe Gin]

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.

[Johnny Wizz]

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.

[Billyblue]

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

[Johnny Wizz]

Thanks Dawn for such a quick response

[rancegal]

  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.

[AngelFish]

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.