Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (67 page)

Adoption and family secrets

The eccentric antiques dealer David Dickinson found out by accident that he was adopted at the age of 12. David had always been led to believe by his adoptive parents that they found him in a Barnardo children's home, but in the course of the programme David's search of the Barnardo records proved inconclusive. He discovered by talking to other relatives that his adoption had been a private affair. David's adoptive mother Joyce had actually been the hairdresser and a friend of his natural mother, Jenny. Joyce offered to look after David when he was born because Jenny had become pregnant by a married man and her strict Armenian father would not tolerate any shame being brought on the family. Jenny later married and moved to Jersey, creating a new life for herself where nobody knew about David
.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 reflected parish authorities' fears that the old poor law system, which allowed unmarried mothers to take maintenance money from the father of their child, was actually encouraging bastardy. Therefore the 1834 Act transferred all financial responsibility for an illegitimate child onto the mother. This new system caused more hardship for women because they were invariably unable to work while caring for a baby, but if they went into the workhouse the poor law authorities were of the opinion that it was better to separate the child from its morally irresponsible mother.

This double bind of social stigma and poverty meant that illegitimacy and adoption often went hand in hand. Many children were given up for adoption if they had been born out of marriage for fear of bringing shame upon the mother's family or in the hope the child would have a better upbringing if the natural father could not be made accountable.

‘Social stigma and poverty meant illegitimacy and adoption often went hand in hand
.'

If you are tracing the line of an ancestor who was adopted it can be difficult to get any further back than that individual without knowing something about their life before the adoption. Prior to the late 1920s and early 1930s all adoptions were arranged privately and the only way
you may have of finding out more is by asking living relatives what they know. However, home truths like this can be hard to come to terms with, so if you plan to speak to relatives about a suspected adoption, be wary and sensitive to their emotions even if a long time has passed since the event.

Researching adoption

Griff Rhys Jones unravelled the truth behind the adoption of his maternal grandmother Louisa Price, who was not illegitimate but was raised by a second cousin and his family. Griff's mother had been told that Louisa was orphaned at a young age after her parents died in a train crash, but Griff discovered that in actual fact Louisa's father died from injuries resulting from a drunken brawl and her mother seemed to disappear after an unsuccessful attempt to get parish relief. Distant relatives who watched the show were able to fill Griff in on what happened to Louisa's mother after her husband's death. It emerged that Louisa's mother, Sarah Louisa Price, was eventually forced to enter the workhouse, but not wanting her children to be brought up in such surroundings she accepted the kind offer of her husband's cousin to care for her young daughter
.

Foundling children, who were abandoned by their parents in the hope that someone would literally find and care for them, were usually suspected of being illegitimate, though some foundlings' parents were married but felt forced to abandon their children due to excruciating poverty. The births of foundling children are often listed in the birth indexes without any names, written simply as ‘male' or ‘female' after the letter Z, and it is extremely unlikely you will be able to find out anything about their origins. If a foundling child was lucky they may have been taken in by a local family and brought up as one of their own children, but most were looked after by the parish authorities and an apprenticeship found for them when they were old enough to work. In 1739 Captain Thomas Coram established the Foundling Hospital to look after children abandoned on the streets of London, which cared for over 27,000 children between 1739 and 1954. And Dr Barnardo established one of the most famous organizations dedicated to caring for orphaned and abandoned children, opening his first home in Stepney in 1867. When the last of the Barnardo's homes closed in 1981 around 300,000 children had been helped by Dr Barnardo's organization.

Whether like David Dickinson you were adopted and need to discover who your natural parents were before you can work back any further, or like Griff Rhys Jones there's an intriguing story of adoption further back in time, the sources here should help you to uncover the truth about your mysterious past.

The term ‘illegitimate' covers a multitude of situations – it could be that both parents were single, or one or both parents were married to another person, that the parents were unmarried when the child was born but they married later on, or a variety of more complex situations which could lead to the legitimacy of the child being questioned. The possibility of sexual exploitation should not be overlooked either. There are many stories of domestic servants being taken advantage of by their employer, and allegations of rape were very difficult to prove so few women were prepared to go through the courts. If you have reason to suspect the mother of your illegitimate ancestor may have pressed charges against the father of the child for rape or sexual assault, then
Chapter 27
will help you to trace the case.

If you have the birth certificate of an illegitimate child, then take note of the address where the child was born. If it was a workhouse or a maternity home then records of the establishment might survive. Special homes were set up for ‘fallen' women from the early nineteenth century. The National Register of Archives can help you to locate the repository for such institutions. In Ireland, where Catholicism had a strong hold, the birth of an illegitimate child was considered particularly problematic. Thousands of young Irish women were sent to convents run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd from the nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, where some were kept for long periods of time and forced to work unpaid in miserable conditions washing laundry, cleaning, and caring for elderly nuns.

The lives of the girls and women who spent years in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries are shrouded in mystery and the abuse suffered by many inmates has only recently come to light when mass graves of unidentified women were unearthed at a Dublin convent. The last Magdalene convent closed down in the 1990s and support groups have since been set up for the survivors and relatives of those who served time for their ‘penitence'. Justice for Magdalenes is a support group whose website can be found at www.magdalenelaundries.com and while records for such institutions are difficult to unearth, they may be able to give you some guidance and direct you to indexes of the names of some of the women who lived and died in the convents.

If you are researching the background of an illegitimate child from a poor or working-class family, your first port of call should be the records of the Poor Law Administrators. You may not have found any evidence of your ancestors entering the workhouse from census returns or certificates, but if they lived on the bread line and an illegitimate child was born it is worth checking the records of the local workhouse to find out if they were forced to enter it for a while.

There are very few official records created by illegitimacy, and the majority of us will find out about an illegitimate ancestor by stumbling across a marriage or birth certificate where the father's name has been left blank. In this case the child will have usually taken their mother's surname, so finding out who the father was can be an impossible task. Up until 1875 if a mother registered the birth of her illegitimate child and told the registrar who the father was, the registrar could enter the father's name on the birth certificate. After 1875 this could only happen if the father was present at the registration and consented to his name being put on the birth certificate. The shame surrounding illegitimacy often produced a web of lies, making a search of the records even more difficult. In rare cases it is possible that an unmarried mother would tell the registrar that she was married and register her illegitimate child's birth under the surname of the father, given that proof of the parents' marriage was not a requirement of registering a child's birth. These factors should be taken into account when searching for the birth certificate of an illegitimate child.

Parish records can be more accurate than civil registration records, particularly if the child was born in the parish where the mother lived,
because the local community would usually know the truth about the mother's situation. Baptism records sometimes state that the child is a ‘bastard', or ‘the base child of', or more politely, ‘the natural child of' the mother, meaning that he or she was born out of wedlock. Occasionally the baptism record will state the father's name as well, so it is worth locating the child's baptism record if their birth certificate leaves you with the suspicion they were illegitimate.

Census returns can be used to provide substantiating material. Returns just before and after the child's birth should be looked at to find out whether the mother was listed as single. Clues such as an unusual middle name given to the child may also hint at what the father's surname was, so take another look at the names of neighbours, employers and visitors found on census returns with the mother.

Census returns, civil registration certificates and parish records are the best tools available to genealogists investigating illegitimate births. They can tell us a lot about the impact illegitimacy had upon the child's life. If the mother married at a later date you may find that the child's stepfather took the child in as his own. This might be assumed if the child started using the stepfather's surname, or if the stepfather is listed as the father on the child's marriage certificate. Equally, evidence like this can prompt more questions than answers – was the stepfather the child's natural father after all? Some illegitimate children were raised by their grandparents as their own child, so that their mother might lead a normal life, particularly if she became pregnant while still quite young. If you find a census return where there is a big
age gap between the youngest child and the other children in the household it is often worth ordering their birth certificate to find out whether the mother's name could be one of the females listed as a sibling on the census.

Poor law records can help in the hunt for the missing father of a child. It's easier to uncover documentary evidence about paternity for illegitimate births prior to 1834 because the local parish was required to either pay for the upkeep of the illegitimate child or chase the father to arrange maintenance payments. This means that a lot of evidence was gathered by parish officers, who would try to obtain a sworn statement from the mother ascertaining the identity of the father. Parish officials drew up bastardy bonds, or affiliation orders, as a sworn statement by the father that he would pay maintenance for the child. When establishing which parish to look under you should be aware that while most people were chargeable to the parish in which they were deemed to have settled, usually where their parents had lived, illegitimate children were chargeable to the parish in which they were born, which may differ from that of their mother's parish of settlement.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 may have put more responsibility on the mother for the maintenance of her child, but the parish authorities could still chase the father for payment in the quarter sessions if the mother became chargeable to the parish and she could provide corroborated evidence that he was the father of the child. Therefore, if you find that your illegitimate ancestor and his or her mother received parish relief between 1834 and 1844, it is also worth searching records of quarter sessions in the local record office.

Prior to 1732 parish officials were known to forcibly remove heavily pregnant women to other parishes to pass responsibility for her unborn child to a neighbouring parish authority, but after 1732 the practice became illegal
.

Mothers were given more power to claim maintenance payments directly from the father from 1844, as well as costs such as paying a midwife or seeking legal advice. These records may be found among affiliation orders in the petty sessions in county record offices, and the system was used to claim money by unmarried mothers well into the twentieth century. You may find reports about the case in local newspapers, some of which have been indexed by local family history societies. Between 1844 and 1858 each petty session and quarter session was required to make an annual return of bastardy cases to the clerk of the peace, who in turn should send a copy to the Home Office. The bastardy returns of this period are usually found in the
local record office amongst records of quarter sessions and petty sessions, but unfortunately the copies sent to the Home Office are not known to have survived.

… trace an illegitimate ancestor

1.
  
If you are investigating an illegitimate line in England or Wales then Ruth Paley's
My Ancestor Was a Bastard
(Society of Genealogists) is worth consulting for an in-depth look at all the possible sources available to you, from Poor Law records to legal records
.

2.
  
If the illegitimate child was a pauper then apprenticeship records might mention them because the parish authorities sometimes organized for a bastard child to be apprenticed to keep them off the poor rates
.