If a marriage register is signed with an "X" rather than a signature...

[stanmapstone]

This may possibly reflect the progressive decline of the use of marks in marriage registers, with 32.6 per cent of husbands and 48.9 per cent of wives being unable to sign in 1841–5, but only 0.8 per cent and 1.0 per cent respectively by 1914 (Seventy-seventh annual report of the Registrar General (1914), xiv). With the spread of compulsory schooling, the signing of the marriage register had become an inadequate indication of levels of functional literacy and education, and the analysis of the data was probably not worthwhile in the over-stretched conditions of the GRO in the late nineteenth century and during the Great War "Literacy" Edward Higgs http://www.rootschat.com/links/06va/
"Signature in Marriage Register" Seventy-seventh annual report of the registrar-general http://www.rootschat.com/links/01ihz/

Stan

[clairec666]

An "X" is never conclusive proof of illegitimacy. Unless I suppose they're the only person that doesn't sign.

A lot of my country labourer folk sign their marriage certificates with an x, but this may have been the assumption of the vicar that they were illegitimate.

[Jebber]

Claire, I think you are confusing illegitimacy with illiteracy, two entirely different things.


Jebber

[groom]

Claire, I think you are confusing illegitimacy with illiteracy, two entirely different things.


Jebber

 

[behindthefrogs]

|An X on a copy certificate doesn't necessarily mean that the mark on the original was not something more significant.  Some people used a complex mark related to their trade or ancestry in the place of a signature.  This was deliberately chosen to be difficult to copy and hence to reproduce  on any copy of an original document.

[sallyyorks]

Does this typically indicate illiteracy on the part of the person signing?

I would say in the vast majority of cases yes.

To add to the other comments. Another way of looking at is that even if someone did sign their name, this does not necessarily mean they were functionally literate. They might have learnt to sign their name just for the ceremony, so their name might have been the only thing they could read and write.

[stanmapstone]

There is no definite answer to this question, it is all supposition, and you can't go back and ask why they signed with an "X" rather than a signature. 

Stan

[bykerlads]

I find the signatures always quite interesting, for although a working class ancestor could write their own name, it was often a rather laboured, untidy signature indicating probably that they only ever rarely did any writing.
An X can indicate that a person was unable to see well enough to sign: we had always wonder d how long OH's grandmother had had cataracts. She had them removed age 60 in 1949 and we had understood that she had been blind for years before that. The proof lies in her marriage cert where she signs with an X, despite coming from a family where all were literate. So we deduce that she was almost blind even age 22.

[andrewalston]

Several years ago my mum and her sister were discussing the certificates I'd got pertaining to one of their great grandmothers.

"What a pity she couldn't read and write", my mum said.

"Oh, she could read well enough", my aunt piped up. "Don't you remember that she'd lost her fingers in the mill?"