Who Was the Daddy? Snippet 3: Belated Marriages

Marriage Certificate – Wellcome Collection, in the public domain.

Modern DNA techniques can now definitively solve questions of paternity, and can even resolve cases from several generations back in the past. But traditionally, there have been many other ways in which family historians could potentially discover who the daddy was when no father’s name appeared on birth certificates. Whilst these methods can never be as accurate as DNA testing, they can produce answers and in addition, tell us a great deal about how illegitimacy was viewed and dealt with in the past

Sometimes, the mother of an illegitimate child went on to marry its father soon after the birth. This may have occurred because of pressure being applied by the local Church authorities. Therefore, even if no father is recorded on the birth certificate or parish baptism register, it’s always worth looking in the marriage indexes for the months and years immediately after the birth of a child to see if the mother did in fact marry at around this time.