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

I agree with Colin. I don't think that you can always be sure of the mother. A major problem in my family tree concerns a child apparently born in 1858 to a 62 year old father and his 2nd wife aged about 45. The child was born (according to a baptism record) 4 months after they got married. So this is just about possible BUT this child's birth was not registered when all post 1837 births of children from the 1st marriage were registered. AND in the household at the time was a 17 year old daughter who subsequently failed to marry at the usual time. So who was the child's mother? Another case involves my Thornton Dale EVERS family. My ancestor Benjamin shows up on the 1841 census aged 11 months. His supposed mother's age is given as 49. In 1851, Benjamin's age is 11 and his supposed mother is 63. On the face of it, this seems obviously a case where Benjamin must be the illegitimate child of one of the unmarried daughters of the family. However, more than one illegitimate child of these daughters had already been acknowledged so why cover up Benjamin's situation? Definitely a case for DNA, if ever I could find the right people to test and then be able to afford all the testing required to resolve the situation. Regards, Irene