unmarried parents

[poppysmum]

I have just found anothr illigitimate birth in the family tree and this time both the parents have signed the birth certificate. I have only seen one of these before.
It took place in Heriot in 1882 and i can't understand why the father would go to the trouble of admitting the baby was his but not actually marrying the mother.
I thought that just wouldn't be on in those days.

Does anyone know anything about this and have any ideas why the man was seemingly allowed to scarper?

Caroline

[JAP]

Perhaps he was not free to marry i.e. already married but was responsible enough to admit that he'd been a naughty boy and had fathered a child by another woman.  Do you know that he 'scarpered'?

JAP

[poppysmum]

I don't know for sure.  The boy was born in Heriot where his mother was working as a domestic servant.  His address is given as Carfrae Mill, Parish of Channelkirk (?).  and he is a ploughman.

On the 1891 census he is living with his grandparents in Fala and Soutra and his mother died on the ist of april 1891.

I do have another one like this where my great great great granny managed to get the father on the second of her illigitimate babies birth certificates.

I will maybe hae a look for the father on the census for 1881 and see what he is up to. 
His name was Thomas Whitson.

caroline

[Lisa La Loba]

I have an ancestor from Fala who was Irish originally.  Her baby was born out of wedlock and she never appeared to have married.  The fathers surname was applied to the child.

As my ancestor was catholic and the nearest church was quite far, I have read that it is common for the baptism to be performed by anyone and just reported to the church. 

It might be the case, this is just a guess of course, that they had said that they will marry as soon as they could get time to go to the church?  Or maybe they couldn't be officialy married because they belonged to a different religion. 

[GUT]

Was he of age.

[aghadowey]

Perhaps it would have been difficult from them to marry due to employment issues (one or both would have lost their jobs, no place to live, etc.) or it may simply have been that they weren't worried about having a child out of wedlock (illegitimacy was not always frowned on in some families).

[Forfarian]

That's actually pretty common. Maybe they just didn't want to marry one another?

There was of course a stigma attached to illegitimacy, but in some areas it was so common that it was an everyday matter. It's quite usual to find in mid-19th century censuses a couple in their 50s or 60s or even 70s with a string of young grandchildren, all with different surnames.

The authorities in Banffshire were astonished when they looked at the records of the first year of statutory registration of births. They found that 19% of the babies registered were illegitimate. The illegitimacy rate varies enormously from one part of the country to another - in some areas it was just 2%.

Illegitimate children were often known by their father's name, even if his name was not on the birth certificate. Sometimes they changed their surnames, being know at one time by their father's surname and at another time by their mother's. Or they might appear in records with both surnames. The important thing to realise is that there were no hard and fast rules about this.

The father's name can only be on the birth certificate of an illegitimate child if he accompanies the mother to the Registrar's when she goes to register the birth, and he signs the register then and there. It cannot be added later to a birth certificate.

So it's perfectly possible that an entire parish knew who the father of a child was, even though his name never appears in any formal record.

However there are two ways of the name of the father of an illegitimate child getting into the statutory birth records even though it isn't on the birth certificate, and never will be.

If the mother goes to court and gets a paternity order against the father, the Register of Corrected Entries (RCE) will contain that information, and the original certificate will be annotated with a reference to the RCE.

If the parents subsequently marry, that legitimises the child provided that the parents would have been free to marry at the time when the child was conceived.  In these cases, the birth is sometimes re-registered many years later with the names of both parents. (A child of an adulterous liaison is not automatically legitimised if the parents marry at a later date.)

[Morvenwalker]

In Aberdeenshire and I assume other parts of Scotland, it is just as other people have said housing and money were a particular problem. illegitimacy was common. Male farm servants lived in bothies and there were only limited cottar houses available for married couples, perhaps one or two on a sizeable farm and these would be occupied by the grieve (farm overseer)and senior farm servants and their families. Junior farm servants were rarely employed permanently but 'fee-ed for a six month period after which they presented themselves at a feeing market to see if they could find better employment. this might result in the young man moving away and the relationship (if there was one) fizzling out. Illegitimate children were usually claimed and accepted within their birth families and might live with either the father or the mother's family.