Is it possible to find the father of an illegitimate child?

[arwela]

All I can say is that in rural communites in Wales which were usually fairly small, the true father's name would soon get out and the local church would get him to sign for the child's responsibility. Those records are never destroyed. They will be somewhere. Tracking them down ain't going to be easy.

[Forfarian]

All I can say is that in rural communites in Wales which were usually fairly small, the true father's name would soon get out and the local church would get him to sign for the child's responsibility.

There are no such records in Scotland, other than what is in the Kirk Session minutes. In particular there are no sheaves of papers with errant fathers' signatures because that wasn't how it was done here.

Those records are never destroyed. They will be somewhere.

Records do get destroyed. A parish near here lost all its registers in a fire, and in another the minister threw the burial records on a bonfire in about 1926 because he decided they were of no interest to anyone. Almost the entire census returns for Ireland from 1841 to 1891 were destroyed because someone decided there was no further use for them. Military records from WW1 were destroyed in a bombing raid on London. Some of the 1841 census enumeration books for Fife were on a ship that sank.

The National Records of Scotland has Kirk Session records for the majority of parishes right through to the end of the 19th century. It does not have any for Tundergarth after 1830.

[Forfarian]

1. When Frances married Gideon Palmer, did she name a reputed father on her marriage certificate?

My apologies, Rosinish has pointed out to me that it wasn't Frances who married Gideon Palmer.

So I should have asked, "Did Frances marry and if so did she name a reputed father on her marriage certificate?"

[Guy Etchells]

Re Bastardy bonds...


they are NOT readily available...

I have been chasing 3 Illegitimates in my family for many years and no JOY as to a bond the only possible connections are middle names of the Child!  sometimes the mother named the child after the 'putative'  father


xin

As with many types of record that depends on the county, many County Record Offices have Bastardy Bonds available, for examples see
http://www.rootschat.com/links/01net/

Findmypast has transcripts of Bastardy Bonds for Lincolnshire & Warwickshire.

The Lincolnshire records are transcripts of three types of documents:

Warrant – an order to the alleged father to appear in court
Maintenance Order – issued by the Justice of the Peace at the Petty Session and orders an individual to pay for the child’s maintenance or face prison
Bond – an agreement to pay for the maintenance of the child

The Warwickshire bastardy index was created by the Warwickshire County Record Office using the original records held at the record office. You will find an index for 4 types of records: bastardy applications, bastardy registers, bastardy return, and appeal. There are more than 5,000 entries from 1844 to 1914. Each record provides the name of the mother, and most records include the name of the putative father. The putative father is the individual who is alleged to be the father of the child. The records do not contain the name of the child.

Cheers
Guy
PS I forgot to mention there is an example of a bastardy Bond from 1853 on my certificates site at
http://anguline.co.uk/cert/certificates.htm

Scroll down to Other Useful Documents
Guy

[Finley 1]

Appreciate that Guy

will investigate some more 

xin

[BillyF]

For years I put on a back burner a grandson ( Robert B. ) of my 2x gt grandfather listed on the Scotland census of 1881. A couple of weeks ago I was reviewing things and realised I`d still got him to investigate - so it transpires that he was the illegitimate son of of my gt grandmother, who was aged 16, and not the child of another married sister. There was also another illegitate child born to another sister, at the moment this child seems to have disappeared.

There is a corrected entry to his birth saying that his father is James B. a grocer, but so far a search for him has not found anything.

Sadly, the child died aged 3, in 1884 and has scrawled acorss his death cert " illegitimate " as does the birth; that seems so wrong , although there is also a comment that they had lived in Hawick for 1 year, so now I  know when the family moved there.