HI Les, I hope you won't be offended by my suggestion. But could the child have been a illegitimate child of someone within the family and your Gt. Grandmother brought the child up as her own to avoid gossip? One of my grandmother's remarried after the death of my grandfather. On the marriage her new husband put his father as James C-------- boat builder. This was in the North East of England not Middlesex but I give it as an example. I looked for this man and his family in the censuses, to find him as a child. I found him as a young boy noted as the grandson of James C------, Boat Builder, and his wife. I then got a copy of his birth certificate which showed his mother to have been Mary C-------- and no father's name on the certificate. Mary C-------- was the daughter of James and his wife, she married a couple of years after the birth of her son but left him with her parents when she went to live with her husband. I have always wondered if Mary's husband knew that the boy was her illegitimate child and not a "brother"of hers. I can only imagine that the grandparents told the neighbours that the little boy was a late child, the grandmother was in her mid forties when he was born. But on official forms they seem to have been honest and put him down as grandson. The family were prominent in the town where they lived because of the fishing cobles they had been building for many many years. An illegitimate child would probably have been an embarrassment for them, better to hide the fact amongst friend and neighbours perhaps by passing him off as a late child of the grandparents. I somehow doubt that the boy/man ever knew that his "sister" was in fact his true mother and believed that his grandparents were his parents. Or did he know the truth and just put his grandfather's name down on his marriage to my grandma in order to avoid his own blushes at not knowing his father's name? Could something like this have been the case? have you tried looking for a birth of the boy in the GRO index under the family surname of your Gt. grandparents. Would Gt. Grandmother have been young enough at the time the child would have been born to have passed him off as her own child. Did she have a child of her own who might have been the mother, or even father, of that child? The fact that you say it was kept very quiet might be the clue you need to explore. If it was all above board then why keep it so quiet? Regards Jenny DeAngelis <<Probably from around 1915/20? There is a family member on my paternal grandmother's side who was apparently a relation (possibly cousin) but was adopted by my GGM and brought up with my grandmother as her brother. From what I know it was kept very quiet and no one seems to know what his surname was pre-adoption, so I don't have much to go on. Les H., >>