Unmarried mother and 10 children with no father(s)

[Hmmph]

I have been researching my family tree.

I have a lady in it who was not married and had 10 children. None of the children have a father in the birth certificates. They were born either side of 1900 and fairly regularly.

Any ideas what this is??

Although it seems a bit more detached as he's simply never on the scene. Like she's not good enough to live with.

Which is a cross class affair where he is known well enough thereabouts to protect the set up from the punishment the other mothers received.

Or is she simply too far on the fringes of society got the moralisers to bother with.

What happened to the other single mothers?

@Hmmph I don't know if this is any use but it might give you some other research avenues to explore
www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Illegitimacy_in_England

One possibility - courtesy of relatives in Ireland who have told me that this was common prior to the legalisation of divorce there - is that she shacked up with a married man whose marriage had previously broken down, they lived as (and were treated by the neighbours as if they were) husband and wife, but couldn't put his name on the birth certificates

This is interesting - would they not have put the father on the BC anyway?

I think the best argument for the father being present /consistent in some way albeit not resident or official, is that the children were kept. Which means they were being supported somehow.

In your scenario 1)
A) why wouldn't she stay, especially if she is able to help her mother on the farm/income from the father? Did the mother own the farm or were they tenants?
B) she wouldn't have been the first, it's not unheard of. Doesn't mean he didn't have alternative sources of comfrot when she was pregnant/nursing.
C) it wouldn't have been celebrated but umarried mothers wouldnt necessarily have been cast out. She might have made out that her husband had died. More tolerance for a widow.

With my rellies, the children (who found out later) were registered with both parents on the birth certificate, just that the child was marked as illegitimate.

My family's brilliant this way - all sorts of interesting stuff. One of my cousins mentioned in passing her elder sister, when I'd known her since we were children and there was just her and her brother. Turned out that the woman I'd been brought up to think of as my aunt's youngest sister (huge Cork family) was in fact her daughter, conceived in the late 1940s, but her fiance then got killed in a car crash. The family passed the resulting child off as the grandmother's "late accident child" - which for the time was actually a remarkably humane solution, given that the alternative was probably a Magdalen Laundry.

I like the common law husband version. If she lived with a man whose wife had left him, then they couldn't marry because he couldn't divorce. He could easily have had a job that meant he was often away. Is the only reason you think he didn't live with them because of census returns or do you have other info that suggests no man was ever resident with them? He could have been a neighbour farmer/tennant on his own farm with his own children to take care of. Maybe their relationship was accepted locally and no eyebrows raised... it's really interesting OP. You're going to have to ask some questions if you can. Previous posters are right, surely it's far enough back that there's no fear of scandal now? Good luck and please Lee is posted!

To a certain degree then, the mother agreed with the daughter and her having all these kids in the farm. Which makes me think the father of the kids was someone she knew /trusted? Old Albert down the road whose wife left him? Still, 10 kids! The grandmother must have liked kids? Or needed farm hands 🤔

Be interested to know if all of the kids had the same dad

Honestly, they were probably that desperate for help on the farm that 'casting them out' was the last thing they'd do!

A bit more information-

Grandmother of all these children was renting the farm. She is paying rent to various different parties. She appears to have been struggling to pay rent by the time she was 80, had to leave at 82 and died aged 84.

However, the mother of all the children then lived on another farm/small holding (teaching her many children how to be farmers and milk the cow!)

One of the many children died aged 3. It says “not baptised” next to his burial record (although I assume as his burial has been recorded by the vicar that he was buried?). I had a look through the burial register and can’t see any other babies burials with this in the margin.

This is a fascinating search!

Such an interesting family search!

@Hmmph this is such an interesting thread. I have a very similar situation in my family tree. My great great grandmother had 9 illegitimate children and was never married. I've been all through all the children's birth and marriage certificates. She was the daughter of an agricultural labourer, in a village, and had an extended family around her. With the first four children she was living with her widowed father and siblings. Then she lived on her own with the children, they were born over a 20 year period between her ages of 19 and 39. She worked as a char woman (which I think meant cleaning) and field worker, I have a photo of her. It seems she raised all her children apart from one daughter who was sent to live with her sister in another village. I believe she was involved with a married man, I thought about prostitution but I'm not sure there was much call for it in villages? I have a suspicion of who the father is and have done an Ancestry DNA test to see if anyone pops up with this name as a match.

It’s very interesting to know it’s not just my family, so thank you for your post! It’ll be interesting to see if you get any answers with your DNA search.

Your great great grandmother seems to have had a very similar situation to mine with the farming background. I think that people might have been more accepting of unmarried mothers than I thought - although I imagine having lots of children with someone else’s husband was never exactly approved of!

I haven’t been able to uncover any more answers with my ancestor, but I have been able to discover a lot more general information about their lives, which has been fascinating. Basically they were poor, but happy. They had plenty of food, the children received education until into their teens and then were able to get a variety of (manual) jobs. However, this information comes from a nostalgic looking back of one of the children not of the unmarried mother. She may well have found life a lot more stressful (and with that many children, I am sure it was!!)

They appear to have been involved with a Masonic organisation too. I wonder if this has something to do with their moderately happy existence ... or even with her having all these children without a husband....

This is such an interesting read and is making me wonder about my family.

I have a distant 'unmarried mother' scenario which I don't think anyone has suggested.
Rural location. Single woman starts regularly having children. Living with her ag lab family. All children have her surname and baptised without a father's name.
However she does later marry a man who is well off. The children take his surname. After a bit of digging it seems they got married weeks after his widowed mother died. It looks as if his mother disapproved of the woman enough to keep them apart well into their 40s. Perhaps by means of support or inheritance. It all seems to have turned out well for them although he didn't live that long after the marriage but the woman and his children inherited his money and property and were the 'gentry' in the next generation.

My husband's grandmother had 5 children and then married about 10 years after the last was born. We think it's probable that he was already married but couldn't get a divorce and maybe had to wait for the first wife to die? Or perhaps he was a bigamist? Probably much easier to pull off 100 years ago...

I have something similar in my tree and it's all a bit of a mystery.

Single woman, lived with her parents and older brothers until they married and left home. She appears on every census with her parents. Then she has a baby, and another, and another. No man. No marriage. No father named on birth certificates or parish baptism records.

I have no idea if it was the same father to all three kids, or differnet men. All children were given the mother's name. When one of the daughter's married, there was no name given for the father.

Clearly he existed. But who was he? I am assuming he was married to someone else. Divorce in 19th century Ayrshire was hardly common.

Another tip @Hmmph - although it's usually more relevant for earlier times - is to see if there are any church records dealing with poor relief, or just general goings on in the parish. In Scotland these are known as "kirk sessions" but i'm sure similar exist in other parts of the UK.

In the 18th and early 19th century the vicar/minister sorted out all sorts of local disputes about people borrowing money, or being drunk and disorderly, property disputes, all sorts of stuff. A distant relative of mine appears in them because he got into a fist fight with a neighbouring farmer over who owned some sheep. It's not unusual to see things in there about John Smith of Acorn Farm accused of being the father of Betsy Jones' bastard child. And it's DRIPPING with judgement too.

A few things that crossed my mind, reading this really interesting thread, is 1, maybe the father was a clergyman who couldn't marry her, no basis foe this idea other than it popped into my head.
2, was she renting the farm from a rich lover.
3, I guess a prostitute couldn't be ruled out, but methods of contraception have been available for centuries, as have methods of abortion. Would a prostitute really have wanted to be burdened with that many children? And if so, when did she ever get time to have sex for money?

You mentioned she had a lot of brothers ? Possibly incestous relationship on that score?