Who Was The Daddy ? Snippet 1: No Father Recorded on your British Birth Certificate

The Fallen Woman, c 1880, anon. Via Wikimedia Commons.

We have probably all experienced that sense of frustration when the birth certificate of an ancestor arrives from the GRO and no father’s name is recorded upon it.

The only thing that we can be reasonably sure about in these cases is that the parents of the child were not married at the time of the child’s birth.

Between 1837 (the start of Civil Registration In Britain) and 1850, there was some confusion over whether an unmarried father could or should register his name at the birth of his child. Some registrars allowed it and some did not.

In the period from 1850 to 1874, it was more generally agreed that an unmarried father should not register his name.

After The Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1874, however, an unmarried father could be recorded (though he was not required to be so) provided both parents were present and signed as informants of the birth.

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The legal process aside, there are a number of other reasons why a father’s name might not appear on a birth certificate:

The mother may not have been sure who the father was (if there were two or more candidates)

The mother may have known who the father was but the father may have been unaware of the fact that he had fathered a child;

The father may have denied paternity of the child (wrongly or rightly); 

After 1875, the (unmarried) father may simply have been absent (away for work or in the military) at the time of the registration of the birth.

Read the snippets which follow over the next few weeks to discover potential ways of finding out who your ancestor’s father actually was!