Hi! Just my six-penny'orth: > it has to do with the family environment children are being raised > in today. And many other times. But these days, certainly in the UK, unmarried parents do mostly register their child jointly, with both their names recorded. In 19C it was a different matter. One of my great-great-grandmothers had a different father named on her death certificate to that named on her marriage certificate. I have been unable to find a birth certificate for her at all. On investigation, it seems she was illegitimate, and her mother (a pauper) and siblings moved to a different parish when she was an infant to avoid falling foul of the Poor Law, which withheld relief from women deemed to be 'immoral'. Her mother passed as a widow, but had been abandoned by her husband, who had then married (bigamously) in another part of Scotland, before moving back into the same area as his first wife. Whether she was still involved with him is unclear, so we haven't a clue about paternity at all. Conversely, my English grandfather and his siblings, who were raised by both parents, all had a middle name which we couldn't explain as a family name. It turned out that it was their mother's legal married name: in this case, she was the bigamist – a herring girl who had left a husband and child in her home port and taken up with another man when working further down the coast. Seven children later, she went through a church wedding with my great-grandfather, in the church where she had married 24 years previously. She called herself a 'widow': in fact, her husband was alive in another part of Yorkshire, and outlived my great-grandfather! best wishes, Marianne