Colin makes a good point! By "fully documented" I meant, of course, a birth certificate which would normally be accepted as being concrete proof of who the mother was even if there's no father shown, unless more than one person has collaborated in a blatant act of deception and the wrong woman has posed as the mother. Such cases must surely be rare? In the case of my own generational tree which appears on the website to which Colin referred, the earliest links are obviously pre-civil registration and derive from parish registers. However, I was extremely fortunate in that the mothers and children were all named and I was also able to find the marriages. Since none of my female ancestors were upper or even middle class, as far as I am aware, the sort of "Downton Abbey" type arrangements to which Colin refers are unlikely to have happened in their case! I was also fortunate in that in a 9-generation tree there didn't appear to be any case of illegitimacy, though of course the proviso about whether the father was the man named in every case would still apply. I certainly have in one of my lines a case in which a young child was named in a census as being the daughter of two of my gt gt grandparents. I was suspicious because of a very substantial age gap, so I got the birth certificate and my suspicions were confirmed because she turned out to be a granddaughter of the couple, the daughter of an unmarried daughter of 17. My thanks to Colin for bringing this to my attention, for I wasn't aware that my article was online. A Happy New Year to all. Roy Stockdill ________________________________ From: Colin Withers via <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, 31 December 2014, 10:06 Subject: [YORKSGEN] Maternal Lines Concerning Roy's article on maternal lines: There is a precis of Roy's article here: http://family-tree.co.uk/2013/03/tracing-women-on-your-family-tree/ Roy recites the old proverb -  "It is a wise child that knows its own father", and while we all know the truth in this, I wondered how much truth there would be in the converse 'It is a wise child that knows its own mother'? Roy goes on to say: "It is, after all, the women who bear children and apart from those (thankfully) extremely rare cases where there has been a hospital mix-up between two newborn babies, a mother always knows who her own natural child is, even if she’s telling fibs about the father! We may not know for certain who someone’s real father was, but if a woman gives birth to a child and this event is fully documented, then the mother’s identity cannot be in any doubt." The key words here are 'fully documented'. I do not know the precise typical numbers of non-paternity events in the period before civil registration, but I would hazard a guess that there were far more illegitimate births than non-paternity events. This being so, and given the shame that illegitimacy invoked in those days, I further wondered about the amount of 'arrangements' that were made. The girl from the lower classes of society in those days had no real option other than to bear the child, and the shame, or hide the pregnancy and abandon the baby on a doorstep, crude abortion, or infanticide, and attempt to cover it up. However, the middle and upper classes, where the scandal was more intensely felt, recourse was often had to 'arrangements'. A pregnant girl from society would often be sent to live with a relative in the country, and the resulting child might be given to a married sister or kinswoman to bring up as her own, or to a family that wanted children, but could not. These informal adoptions were rarely recorded, if ever. A theme in the television series Downton Abbey uses this very scenario, where one of the Earl's daughters has an illegitimate child, who was given to a family that tenants part of their estate to raise as their own. I have first-hand experience of these kind of 'arrangements' in my own family, but I cannot go into detail here, except to say that there was never going to be any attempt to 'document' the arrangement. So, what do you think, in a 10-generation male line of descent versus a female line of descent, what is the risk of a non-paternity event in the male descent versus informal adoption in the female descent? Colin ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message