Did my great GM lie to six children their father was dead?

[AntonyMMM]

Deliberately lying to a registrar in relation to entries in registers is a specific offence under the Perjury Act, but only if the information is "required by law" ..... the father's details are essentially optional, and not a part of the legal process.


Likewise - occupation information is not legally required. People can get very creative when describing their own, or a relative's, occupations on register entries- registrars call it "occupation inflation".

[Mart 'n' Al]

"occupation inflation".  I love it.  I keep a list of these if I see them in the press,

Customer Success Specialist
Talented creatives
Data carving specialist
Instant Return Representative
Individual Giving Manager
Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic Manager
Long Term Teachers
Web Crawling Business Analyst

I hope I just haven't hijacked my own thread.

Martin

[groom]

We all know that certificates are only as good as what the person tells the registrar. Nothing, as far as I know was checked. That's why we have people "inventing" fathers on marriage certificates if they were illegitimate, giving the wrong status i.e. single rather than widowed, wrong ages etc. If it was a crime then probably a quarter of my ancestors were guilty.

[jim1]

Yes misdirection was common.
If George wasn't the father (& he knew it) she couldn't put his name on the birth cert but there was nothing stopping her from making one up which looks like what's happened here.
So a possible scenario is that Jane's got pregnant by another man & George leaves her.
She registers your Grandad as Thompson & gives a mix of both "husbands" as the father.
He's brought up as Leggett as that was the family name & to maintain respectability.

[Craclyn]

Very difficult to guess at who knew what. The children may have known he was still alive, but described him as deceased rather than facing the social stigma of him having moved out. I have a 3x great granny describing herself as a widow on the census in Northumberland. Hubby had fled the country with a woman who lived closed by plus illegitimate child. He was alive and well running an oyster bar in Schenectady, New York.

[Mart 'n' Al]

Thanks Craclyn, there is a film script there!

I'd swap any certificate for ten minutes of being a fly on the well in my GGM's house!

Martin

[Craclyn]

When you have done being the fly on the wall there can you just buzz over to where my mysterious great grandfather lived and see if you can hear him telling anyone what his original name might have been? 

[jim1]

To go back to your original question I believe she believed he was dead.
If she wanted him erased from the family history why put his real name on the marriage cert?
She could have taken a leaf out of her mother's book & called him Henry Leggett or some such.
You can imagine the children when young asking where's dad gone & being told he'd died.
I think any stigma would have lied with the mother as she's the one he left.

[LizzieW]

I have a couple who separated, but probably didn't divorce as most people didn't in the late 1800s unless they were very rich.  They both "re-married" someone else and she said she was widowed, he said he was single.  However, the same 2 children of the couple were witnesses at both weddings, so they obviously knew what they were telling the registrar was a lie.  I've had ancestors stating their father was deceased when he wasn't, I don't think the registrars were too worried at the time.  I even had one man tell the registrar that he was the husband of the deceased woman.  The record was amended a few months later to show that my g.uncle was in fact the husband of the deceased.  A statement (shown on the death cert) was made by her daughter and the supposed husband to the fact that the information given was wrong.  Perhaps she'd told him her husband was deceased and even though she hadn't gone through a bigamous marriage, her partner wanted the certificate to seem respectable.

It doesn't help when the parish clerk writes down the wrong info either.  One of my ancestors was baptised and her father was put down as a man who was her uncle.  It's possible that's correct, but more likely as the other man had children about every 10 months with his wife, the parish clerk was so used to writing Richard X as the father at baptisms, that when he saw the same surname he just put Richard.  Another parish clerk wrote my grandmother's name as her father's.  No wonder I couldn't find her baptism for ages (and no she didn't have a brother with her father's name).