It is a really interesting article. I seem to have seen a few movies lately where the lord of the manor had first night with the new brides in their area. How common was that? Did it help or hinder the gene pool? I suppose there are, and were, a lot of children born due to incest and other forms of assault which were never recorded. Future DNA testing will probably match all of us in quite interesting ways. I certainly knew a couple who adopted illegally (purchased) some years ago, they were poor people living a in a caravan..... so would not have been approved by authorities and another couple who were "given" two small children on a long train train journey.....possibly stolen? Lots of children have been stolen around the world. Families are social structures as well as biological, important to be inclusive of all the possible relationships, and see the influence of all the varied possibilities.. I work with tracing dna in families and in that case it is important to know about adoptions, but many people just don't know they are adopted eg dont find out until they develop an inherited disease or need an organ transplant and then it comes up. And what about all the sperm donation children? I liked the story of the first "medical" sperm donation conducted in a US hospital in the 1880s. The woman was anaesthetised and never knew about it, just thought she was having a helpful procedure. her husband knew, he had the fertility problem. The medical students present were asked to nominate one of themselves to be the donor eg discussed their attributes, one was "dobbed" and donation made, lady pregnant and never knew. Heaven knows what else the medical profession might be responsible for. Marg -----Original Message----- From: Colin Withers via Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 9:06 PM To: [email protected] 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