By Any Other Name?

This week I worked on an heir tracing case concerning a man who was known by two different surnames – neither of which, it turned out, was exactly what was recorded on his birth certificate.

I've also had a few enquiries lately about people who changed their surnames and that has got me thinking about some of the reasons why a person might change their name, or be known by a variety of different names.

One of the most common reasons was probably illegitimacy. In Scotland in particular, illegitimate children usually took their father's surname. However, on statutory birth records the name of the father of an illegitimate child is normally only recorded if he was present at the time the birth was registered (alternatively if the mother brought an action of paternity against the father his name might be given in an R.C.E.). Therefore the surname on the birth certificate may be one the child never used. Some individuals born to unmarried parents seem to alternate between two surnames, sometimes being recorded with their father's name, sometimes with their mother's.

Also quite common (in my family at least) were women who took the surname of a man they lived with, but were not actually married to. I discovered quite recently that one of my relatives who did this actually changed their name by deed poll.

Then there were children who were adopted and subsequently took the surname of their new family. Adoption only became legally recognised in England & Wales in 1927 and in Scotland in 1930. However many informal adoptions took place before these dates. I came across an example of this recently by accident. When researching a family of Scottish origin I was surprised to come across the death, aged 7 months, of a boy who had apparently emigrated to New Zealand twelve years later. My first thought was that a younger child had been given the same name but I could find no evidence of this in birth records. It turned out that following the death of their child the couple 'adopted' a baby born to an unmarried mother and gave him the name of their dead son. As this was prior to adoption being legally recognised there is no official record of this. Luckily, the information had been passed down through the family or this might have remained a mystery.

Similarly, children of a widow might acquire the surname of their mother's husband should she marry again. Even if this did not happen step-children may be recorded in census returns under the surname of the head of household regardless of whether they actually used the name.

Other reasons for a change of surname might include to benefit from an inheritance, an immigrant changing their name to one found in their adopted country and, of course, someone who deliberately wished to conceal their identity.

In fact, for our ancestors, a change of name seems to have been incredibly easy and, in most cases, left little documentary evidence. This presents rather a challenge to the family historian, who often has little more than a name to go on when searching for their forebears.

I wonder how often a change of name could be the reason for a research brickwall. Then again, there are some ancestors who by any other name would still present a challenge!

Sex and the Scottish Ancestor

When I first began researching my Scottish ancestors and discovered that my great-grandfather, Hector McNeil (1886-1954), was born just one month after his parents married I was a bit surprised. Surely a hint of scandal here? Something that got the neighbours gossiping? I mean that just wasn’t the done thing back then, was it?

Further research revealed that not only did Hector follow this particular family tradition, his first child being born six months after he married, but that both Hector’s father and grandfather lived with and had children by women to whom they were not married.

Expanding my research to other family lines I discovered similar stories: a couple who married five months after the birth of their first child; a woman who had two children, probably by the same man, but never married.

Were my ancestors turning out to be the most immoral in Scotland or was there something else going on here? Was it just that my preconceptions were wrong?

As a teenager, I think I had the vague idea that pre-marital sex was ‘invented’ in the 1960s. Even then, as my mum was keen to point out, the ‘sexual revolution’ didn’t affect everyone, with many people continuing to live with their parents until they married and ‘baby’ arriving a respectable one year after the wedding.

Of course as a keen viewer of costume dramas I did know about illegitimacy. Some innocent young girl taken advantage of, usually by an employer, is thrown out and disowned by her family when her pregnancy is discovered. She usually comes to a sticky end and should the child survive the ‘shame’ of illegitimacy follows him or her throughout life.

No doubt such situations did happen, but in my family the majority of illegitimate children appear to have been born to parents in long-term relationships.

As I’ve researched more and more families I’ve discovered that mine are hardly unique. There do appear to have been some regional differences though and, as these particular ancestors of mine were all involved in coalmining, I suspected that sex before (or outside) marriage was particularly common in Scotland’s mining communities.

However, this week I’ve been researching two families from the north of Scotland, one from a fishing community, the other from an area that was largely agricultural, and I’ve been finding much the same thing.

This has got me thinking about the issue again. Firstly, was the apparently high rate of pre-marital sex in Scotland (or ante-nuptial fornication as it is often described in Kirk Session records) related to the law that legitimised children upon the subsequent marriage of their parents? (This applied only when both parents were free to marry, i.e. not married to someone else, at the time of the child’s birth.)

It is difficult to know how aware people were of this law but it may explain why some parents were content to wait until after the arrival of their child to get married, rather than rush to tie the knot before the birth. Legitimacy was generally only important with regards to inheritance and as most working-class Scots had little to pass on to their children the legal situation was perhaps of less importance than the attitudes of their neighbours.

The law doesn’t always seem to have been universally applied either, as I found recently. I came across a child who was born to parents who married a few days later but waited until after their marriage before registering the birth. The registrar, however, considered the birth to be illegitimate (the word is included on the birth record) although the date and place of the parents’ marriage was recorded, as is usual on Scottish birth certificates.

It has been suggested that pre-marital pregnancy was seen as an insurance against infertility, particularly in agricultural communities where a farm worker was expected to provide family labour. Personally though, I think the most convincing argument is simply that in some communities sex was an accepted part of the courtship process, just as it is for many people today.

But what I’ve really been thinking about is why all this pre-marital sex should come as such a surprise to me. Why did I think that the youth of great-granny’s day were so very different from my own generation? Was there a particular time when what was once common behaviour began to be seen as something to be ashamed of and to be hidden from later generations? Has there be a deliberate attempt to rewrite history?

If so, I’m sure our ancestors weren’t expecting all us genealogists to come snooping around uncovering their secrets!