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Bastardy cases


Thorntons girl

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I have a relative who had a child around 1910, the child did not have a father on the birth certificate.

I thought I would have no chance of finding the Fathers name but after attending The Sheffield History fair I was told that there could have been a bastardy case.

Does anyone have information on this and know how I should go about finding this lost father??

All help appreciated.

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From my understanding these cases would be opened if the child needed to get support due to low income on the mother's part. Rather than the Parish pay for poor relief for the child, they would seek out who the real father was. A bit like the child support agency! So it would depend on if the mother found herself in circumstances that she would need to claim from the parish. Such records would be in the archives. Of course if the father was not found then the parish had to pay out the money. Or if the father was sick or too poor to pay anything. But there would be records of this depending which parish they were living in at the time of the claim. A claim could have been lodged at any time, till the child was old enough to work. 

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 Hi Thorntons girl.  There could be a clue in your relatives name.

My Father and Grandfather were both registered with name of the Father left blank.

But both my Father and Grandfather were given the surname of the Father for second christian names by their Mothers.

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I should also have said that the cases were generally brought to the attention of the Parish officials by the need of the parish not wanting to pay out poor relief, not by the mother trying to claim support from the father. In fact the mother would have found the whole thing as strangers passing judgement on her, which in most cases they were! 

Sometimes these cases would also occur if the mother died leaving any children to the parish to deal with. And the local population believed the father to be still alive and had abandoned the mother and children. 

In some places these "bastardy returns" as they were called were highly prised and they went over the top to collect them! It really cut the amount given in parish relief if you could find a father to pay for them!

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