Lying about a baby's parentage during WW2?

[Ozmi]

Does anyone know how easy it would have been to lie on the birth certificate during WW2? Plenty of women got pregnant by non-husbands but also some men got other women pregnant and the babies were handed over to be brought up by wives. In the chaos of war, would it've been easy to lie about who the mother really was on a birth certificate?

Given that we don't confirm with DNA checks at birth (I'm not at all saying we should btw) I think it's quite likely that even now there's plenty of "dads" who are incorrectly listed on the birth certificate.
I think it's much much less likely, although not impossible, that women were incorrectly listed on the birth certificate.

Both were extremely common. You only have to look at the number of family trees where there is a child much younger than the others corresponding to when a daughter was in her late teens and her baby was just added onto the end of the family, or where a woman long married with no children suddenly has one in her 40's but has nieces. In some families this was more of an open secret than others but was very easy to arrange with home births and daughters 'going to help aunty' elsewhere for a few months. In my grandmothers family there are a couple which look very suspiciously like this

My mother was brought up by her grandparents and born during the war, 1942. Her 14yr old mother was played off as an older sister. Classic Eastenders “you ain’t my mother!”/“yes I am!” reveal when she was early teens. It would have been much more convenient to have her grandparents as parents on BC but they weren’t- her parents were listed as her “sister” and no father, because they weren’t married so she couldn’t list his name. Obviously she never saw her own BC until she was much older.

This makes me think it wouldn’t have been easy, because if it would have been they’d have done it.

I think this might have been quite common in days gone by, babies being kept in the family rather than given up to strangers. Grandparents being "mum and dad". Not sure about falsified birth certificates though, although it probably did happen I some circumstances

If a baby was born at home with no medical intervention, which was probably not unusual at the time, it could have been possible for a woman who wasn't the mother to register the child as hers.

I suppose it depends on the practicality of what was operating at the time in terms of registration offices. How does it happen these days? Is there cross checking between hospital births and registration offices? What if you have a home birth?

If you deliberately wanted to misrepresent the birth mother and she colluded with the registered mother, would it be detected?

Something else that wasn't unheard of was that if an unmarried woman or young girl had a baby, then the child might be brought up with it's DGM, an aunt or other older (married) female relative claiming to be the mother to avoid the stigma of a child born out of wedlock.

Although I don't know if the deceit would have been at an official level, or just 'for show' in the local community, as in who was said to be the mother vs who was registered as such.

My great aunt had a child by her "fiancee" that died overseas baby was adopted from birth though,

I think it was relatively even for women they didn't go to Dr's and also homebirths were normal so easily pass off their unwed daughters baby as their own.

I would love to know this too. My dad was born during the war when his mum was 45. He had two unmarried sisters in their 20s by then and I have always wondered…

It was very common. Also, babies born to married women are legally their husband's child and referred to as such on the birth certificate (I assume there's a way around this - but this mechanism certainly hides a lot of extra-marital births during wars etc).

My great grandmother had a baby during the war quite a few years after her husband was last seen…

It definitely happened well before the WW2 I had a lovely (courtesy long time family friend of my dads family) great aunt who loved to gossip to me about our family (scandal) history
A distant male cousin of hers married a female cousin of my grandma's family (pre ww1) - the child (scandal) was a child of the master of the house they both worked for. Sadly the young man was not treated well by his (adopted) father & disappeared before ww1 no one knew what happened to him. DGA also told me of several 5 month babies (!!) born after marriages to other members of the family.
Seriously - even these are open secrets it just shows how difficult this real issue was for many young women in past days where the only choice was to get married. & though these were open secrets (I think dga was told by her mother!) in the family outside of the family the children were identified as the married father's child.
Even since the 70's things have radically changed

Not quite the same, but my grandma was born in 1924 and her father died in 1922, and he was put on the birth certificate. He of course wasn't her father as being dead wouldn't have been capable of this.
Her father was a 'man friend' of my great grandma.
Crazy really that she didn't question this until her mother died and she found her 'fathers birth certificate'

I'm guessing this was common. DM was born in 1941 but her parents are definitely her parents and so was her best friend (her parents were her parents).

My nana when she was about 19/20 met someone and thought she was pregnant (in early 1930s) and panicked and married him. Turned out he was a confidence trickster who stole from her and was sent to jail. Of course soon after she married him she did fall pregnant, with my aunt.

@Gonnagetgoing

I'm guessing this was common. DM was born in 1941 but her parents are definitely her parents and so was her best friend (her parents were her parents).

My nana when she was about 19/20 met someone and thought she was pregnant (in early 1930s) and panicked and married him. Turned out he was a confidence trickster who stole from her and was sent to jail. Of course soon after she married him she did fall pregnant, with my aunt.

DM was born in 1941 but her parents are definitely her parents and so was her best friend (her parents were her parents).

What does that mean???

@Choux - sorry not explaining very well! My DM - her parents are legally and look like her, her parents - no affairs there.

My DM's best friend (M) who actually lived with them for a while - her parents also were legally hers and looked like her (M).

The reason why I'm saying this is that during the war (WW2) and in London, the wives had a lot of fun - that's all I'm saying - my grandfather came home from Paris with a 'present' for my nana which she wasn't best pleased about. But they were all faithful apparently before WW2 broke out.

My dh ",Granddad" came back from war to his wife and was greeted with two extra babies 🤔
But yes in absence of DNA tests and lots of home births I'm guessing it was much easier to pass off a baby as yours ,when it was actually your grandchild..

FIL thought his mum was his older sister until he was 13. He was born in 1938.

It was still happening in the 1970s when I worked for the DHSS. The baby would be looked after by grandparents as theirs but the actual mother would be on the birth certificate. If the grandparents were claiming benefit and the actual mother working the mother would have to pay to support the child. If the mother became unemployed she would have to claim benefit for the baby in her name.

If a couple is legally married, than all children born within the marriage are presumed to be the offspring of the husband (which is why you can register your baby's birth without your husband there). So was and still is very easy to register a baby as your husband's when they're actually not.

Mis-registering the mother is harder these days, as there's more of a paper trail regarding maternity care, and many births are registered in hospital. But pre-NHS, home birth was the absolute norm and very few people would have routine care during their pregnancies. So it would be relatively easy to turn up with a newborn in your arms and claim them as your own (this was quite often done within the family to protect young unmarried girls, with a married mother or aunt claiming the baby). Some of your neighbours might know or suspect. But as long as the baby was being cared for, I imagine everyone would just look the other way and say nothing.

It was happening a lot later than WW2.

My friend's DM was sent to another part of the UK to have my friend in the 60s, with the plan to give my friend up for adoption after she was born. The dm declined to allow adoption and brought friend up herself, but was effectively banished.
A relative- my cousin's wife- also born in the 60s. Until well into adulthood thought the woman who raised her was her mother. She was actually her DGM.

DH has just had his ancestry done and he has NO English markers at all, which doesn’t tie up with who his GPs are supposed to be. My mums mum was pg with her when her husband came home from the war and so she couldn’t have been his but it was never spoken about
I listened to a piece on it on R4 a while ago about children born to women by Black GIs, which was obviously a bit harder to cover up

A man bringing his mistress’s baby home to be raised by his wife is trickier. His wife wouldn’t have looked pregnant so it would be more likely raise questions. The cases where I’ve heard of that it was done as a private adoption as in ‘oh hey, I’ve heard about a baby we can adopt’ without indicating it was the husband’s own child. Or I guess a very kind wife might take the child knowing their paternity, but that seems a lot to accept. A man wouldn’t be named as father of a child delivered to an unwed mistress (and if she were married, the baby would belong to her husband)

Mothers often took on the child of their unwed daughter. Sometimes it was basically known to all but the child called their grandparents mum and dad or at the other end of the spectrum the grandmother pretended to be expecting while hiding the daughter’s pregnancy. No one would assume any different if all went well (no one is going to accuse a mother of 7 that the 7th actually belonged to the 1st child and not to her) but it’d unravel if the delivery went badly, as in an episode of Call The Midwife.

Due to many record offices being destroyed it was very easy to just be someone else let alone lie about parentage.

My great grandmothers son was 'adopted' by the man she had an affair with and his wife. This was WW1-ish. We actually met him when our great grandma died. His adoptive mother is listed as his bio mother on his BC. We only found out because the couple wrote to her and she kept the letters. He then wrote to her as an adult when they told him the truth.

My great grandad on my mums side, didn't exist until the day he got married. He moved to England from Greece and just took an English name. Got married using that name, but no trace of him ever actually changing names. We don't actually know his name before then.

I think this sort of stuff was all quite common.