Knowingly lying on a birth certificate

[Zaphod99]

Galium, the mother used her own unusual middle name as her surname.  The mother's five siblings all had a fairly common surname, but the elder daughter was given what is probably a distant family name as a middle name.  The elder daughter, the one who gave birth, either chose to use her middle name as her surname or was encouraged to by her own mother.

I will be buying the certificate, once I have ensured that nobody else in the family has already got it in their possession.

Zaph

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

Or do you mean that the index is showing a mother's maiden name as well as the surname the birth is indexed by?  In which case  the birth has been registered as if the child was born to a married couple
and there will be father's details, albeit (probably) with the wrong surname.

Just because a birth registration looks as if the child was born to a married couple that does not mean a father will be named on the certificate. My birth index entry and cert are examples of that.  As Anthony has said on many threads there is no way to know what is on a cert based on the index.

[Galium]

Sorry Glen. I didn't read your post properly, and I had understood that a married woman's husband's name would always be recorded as the father, no matter what the truth was, or what she happened to tell the registrar.
 
Thanks for the information.