I, too, have some German ancestors who had illegitimate children. I learned that in many places in what is today's modern Germany during many years of the 1800s, the ruling prince required a very large fee relative to the average person's wages before the couple could be officially married. Most(?) peasant farmers and other poor could often not afford to get married and many of them took years to save the fee required. Each principality had different rules so it's not a universal. Often after marriage the father would formally acknowledge them with a civil record to this effect, and sometimes it was ntoed in the church records. But many times this was never done. In other cases, the woman eventually married someone else possibly because he was slightly better off and could be a better provider. I understand that this fee was one approach the ruling class took to shift the burden for the cost of government (mostly the prince's lavish lifestyle) from just land owners to the whole population. This made the prince popular with his friends, the land owners, were a very small percentage of the population even if land was the main source of wealth back then. Jim