"It seems very unlikely to me that the Catholic Church, let alone the local citizens, would have been ok with all of these illegitimate births. I would think that they would have been ostracized from the community." I found the answers to this very interesting. I think any of them is worth pursuing, if you want to really know. I have just a thought or two to add. One thing I know from my own research is that the things we assume, such as earlier generations being uniformly Victorian in mores, may not be true in all cases. I know that while if you ask the average American where women were in the 1950's they will say home raising the children, but I know of numerous women who worked - in some cases to support themselves, and in others to support their families. In my family there were at least two who worked almost all of their adult lives, retired, and were able to live well on their retirement benefits. So it is clearly not true that ALL the women were home with the kids, even if our expectation is that they were. Especially if the laws made it difficult for a family to marry, the local church's response may have been more understanding than we would tend to think, if only to make sure that the children were raised Catholic, rather than something else. We might expect ostracism bases on what we have heard from the Church during parts of the 20th century, but that might have been far from the case in that time and place. Theresa