Disguising illegitimacy on birth certificate

[markheal]

Family fibs:
I was told that a whole sibling group had been born in India 'on the wrong side of the blanket' and then abandoned by the wealthy 'father' to poverty in London.  This would, they thought, explain why they could never find their own civil birth records!  Luckily, I cracked this brickwall when they were all found on the Hanwell and Southwark censuses with a different surname.

[panda40]

Not a direct ancestor but one of my twigs I was researching this afternoon. The couple married on 1917. Have a son in  late 1917. The husband gets killed in May 1918 on board a navy ship. Wife has another son in 1920. She is still a widow on the 1939 register. I wonder who the real father is?
Regards
Panda

[suey]

It's sad that rifts in one generation lead to alienation in another. Seems many tell lies, too. A friend found that his uncles and aunts had told their children that his parents weren't married, when his father had divorced his first wife and remarried. Another person in his family, told a woman that her deceased father was illegitimate, when all that had happened was the mother became pregnant and married when 4-6 months gone.

So it seems there are people who go out of their way to try to legitimise their children and other people who try to de-legitimise legitimate children out of spite.

In my case the children from the marriage turned up after their mothers death hoping that she had 'left a few bob and they wanted their share', they seemed to think that their mother owned the house that the family were living in. In actual fact they hadn't a pot to pee in as the saying goes 
So yes, spite and probably hurt on their part that their mother had left them when they were all small children, gone on to have another happy family, and they wanted, well, what, revenge?  All very sad .