How to find out who fathered your illegitimate ancestors

and how I found my great-great-great-grandfather using Ancestry DNA. Well I might have done. It gets complicated.

Family historians encounter many dead ends in their research. But the most common is often the most overlooked. I am talking about illegitimacy. There is a tendency to accept that the father’s identity of an illegitimate ancestor is lost to time and to move on, leaving a gap on our pedigree charts forever open. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Pretty much everybody will have an illegitimate ancestor and most of us will have several. It is usually pretty easy to spot them. The absence of a father on a child’s birth and marriage certificates is the most telling sign, but there are others, among them: missing baptism records, changes in a child’s surname during their life, a child growing up either with grandparents or in an institution (like a workhouse or industrial school). Sometimes we just don’t notice. One of my great-great-grandfathers was born in 1865 to a 48-year-old mother and the sibling closest to him in age was born in 1856. He had six sisters born between 1838 and 1850, so either this was something of a miraculous conception or one of those sisters is my great-great-grandfather’s actual mother. I only realised this recently, so Victorian attempts to conceal scandals can still fool us today!

Some background on illegitimacy in Britain

Illegitimate births were often scandalous and could cast a shame on the baby’s mother that was hard to shake. But I am still fascinated by how much of a scandal illegitimate births really were and how much they actually affected the life of the illegitimate child. The answer seems to vary based on several factors: when the baby was born, the baby’s social class, regional variations in legal rights and how fanatical an area’s religious population was. Illegitimate children often just folded into their mother’s family and lived with step-fathers and half-siblings, their futures unhampered by their birth status. Even at the very top of the social pyramid illegitimacy was rarely a barrier to success, so long as the child’s father was influential and wealthy. Sir Edward Walpole (son of Robert Walpole, Prime Minister from 1721 to 1742) had four illegitimate children with Dorothy Clement, the daughter of a Darlington postmaster. Their daughter Maria Walpole married both the 2nd Earl Waldegrave and later Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, the little brother of King George III. Neither did illegitimacy stop an aristocrat from doting on their child. In 1881 the 8th Duke of Marlborough (Winston Churchill’s uncle) fathered Guy Bertrand Spencer with Edith Peers-Williams, the wife of the 7th Earl of Aylesford. Guy Bertrand Spencer worked as a brewer in Aylesbury and later as a smallholder, before dying in 1950 in Guildford. Marlborough reportedly cared a lot more about Guy than he did about his other, legitimate, offspring. 

(Just a quick sidenote: the absence of a recorded father can lead to all sorts of fantastical myths, some the fault of generational story-telling and some the result of imaginative family history. I think it is bad practice to assume the employer of a servant was the baby’s father. Stable boys were probably just as randy as aristocrats).

But attitudes certainly shifted over time. The rising influence of the middle class, with their more evangelical views of domestic life, hardened views on bastardy in the 1830s, resulting in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that removed legal responsibility for father’s to provide for their illegitimate children. Somewhat ironically this bill was passed during the premiership of Earl Grey, who had fathered his own illegitimate child with the Duchess of Devonshire in 1792. The amendment hoped to reduce illegitimate births by shaming the mothers. It is estimated that the amendment caused illegitimate births to decline from 7% in the 1840s to around 4% for the rest of the Victorian age, but it also led to more covert methods of hiding illegitimate births so the data may be off. The amendment also marks an important date for genealogists as it led to many areas stopping their poor law bastardy registers, making it harder to trace father’s after 1834.

Even though women could no longer challenge their baby’s fathers in court for money, the historian Ginger S. Frost has noted in her excellent book Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860-1930 that many inconsistencies emerged in the law. She writes that:

“What was most crucial, though, was the many places where differences emerged: between judges and juries, judges in different branches of the law, and local and national authorities. Moreover, unwed mothers knew their children had two parents, and local families did as well, even if the law claimed these children were ‘fatherless.’ In other words, English society faced dilemmas in dealing with illegitimate children, not only because the law was inconsistent, but because illegitimacy also contradicted one of the most basic relationships in society, that between children and their parents. Furthermore, domestic ideology was divided on this issue, as it enjoyed a deep disapproval of illegitimate births but also venerated the mother-child bond as sacred. Little wonder illegitimacy remained a problem for authorities, leading to a host of negative outcomes.”

Many illegitimate children suffered horrible fates, often facing abandonment or murder. But it does seem that even after 1834 views on illegitimacy, and illegitimate children, differed between places and social groups. In some families illegitimacy was a norm and didn’t just happen once. My great-great-great-grandmother Lucy Rushton was born illegitimately, she had an illegitimate half-brother, her daughter Anne Rebecca Kime had three illegitimate children and her son William (my great-great-grandfather) married an illegitimate woman and after her death married the mother of an illegitimate son. If social stigma was cast on Lucy’s household it would have been very awkward, as they lived next door to the clergyman. So legal inconsistencies present genealogists with opportunities to find their illegitimate ancestor’s father, even without modern methods.

How to find the father of an illegitimate ancestor

1. Bastardy registers

If your ancestor was born before 1834 family historians can always look within bastardy registers. Lucy Rushton was born before the amendment was passed and I believe this is her bastardy certificate, showing that her father was one Charles Richardson, an ostler (someone employed to look after the horses of people staying at an inn) in Market Deeping:

2. Newspapers

In some areas after 1834 mothers still challenged father’s to help provide for their children in the courts. FindMyPast’s newspaper archives can help a lot here, as these proceedings were often written up in the local rag. Here are some random examples.

From the York Herald, 2nd May 1868:

From Market Rasen Weekly Mail, and Lincolnshire Advertiser, 10th May 1879:

From Lincolnshire Chronicle, 9th May 1851:

3. DNA

If these methods should fail you - as they have often failed me - you can always turn to DNA analysis. My great-great-grandmother Annie Pape was born in 1873 in Hull. In the previous census her mother Maria Pape had lived with her family in Louth, Lincolnshire and had worked as a domestic servant. She already had one illegitimate daughter, who died as an infant before Annie’s birth. In the 1881 census Maria is living back in Louth, she has married a platelayer called Robert Bell and Annie lives with them listed as Mr Bell’s daughter but is still using her mother’s maiden name. Mr Bell’s name does not appear on Annie’s marriage certificate in 1893 to William Kime. I doubt he was her father but calling him his daughter shows an acceptance of Annie into his household, despite any stigma that may have been attached to her birth status. I always thought finding the identity of Annie’s father would be impossible, as it did not show up in any newspapers at the time and no information was passed down through the family. But then I did an Ancestry DNA test and got my dad to do the same. Like most family historians I am a lot more interested in my matches than I am in my genetic ethnicities.

After quite a bit of time searching through my fourth or fifth or sixth cousins, I stumbled upon a constant link to the descendants of Richard Mumby (1779-1844) and Elizabeth North (1779-1867) who lived in the village of Wold Newton, 8 miles from Louth. I had never seen their names appear in my research before and assumed they must be some connection to either Annie Pape or her illegitimate mother-in-law Lucy Rushton. In fact I had more than 10 DNA matches from among their descendants, ranging from 11cM to 40cM of DNA, indicating that we share at least a great-great-great-grandparent. But even if I was to assume that any of Richard and Elizabeth Mumby’s many many sons and grandsons had fathered Annie Pape I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I was related in some way to Richard or Elizabeth through another way. Wold Newton is close to all the villages where both my great-grandfather’s paternal and maternal sides are situated. Either of them may have been a cousin somehow of one of Annie’s husband's forebears.

These doubts plagued me for some time, until I started to look further into the shared matches of Richard and Elizabeth’s descendants. I soon realised that the amount of shared DNA increased among the children of Harriet Mumby (b. 1802 in Louth) than among my DNA matches who are descended from her siblings.

Harriet Mumby had married Robert French (b. 1796 in Hatcliffe) in 1820 in Wold Newton and had seven children (four daughters and three sons). Looking a bit closer at the shared matches of Harriet and Robert’s descendants I realised that quite a few of them did not descend from Richard and Elizabeth Mumby. In fact my dad has fifteen DNA matches descended from Robert French’s father (also called Robert French), eight of them coming from Robert French Jr’s siblings. This is where I got just a bit excited, as it meant that my connection to both the Mumby family and the French family had to come from the children of Robert French and Harriet Mumby, who only had three sons.

(It is worth remembering that Maria Pape was born in 1849 and she grew up in Louth, where she was still living in 1871. She gave birth to Annie in Hull in 1873, presumably because she went to stay with her older sister while she was pregnant and later came back to Louth, where Annie was raised.)

Robert French and Harriet Mumby’s three sons were:

1. William French (b. 1829 in Wold Newton) was a wagoner and agricultural labourer who was living in the village of Stainton le Vale in 1871, more than 11 miles from Louth. He married Mary Carter and had one child, Harriet French (b. 1858). 

2. Elijah French (b. 1837 in Wold Newton) was also an agricultural labourer. He moved far away from Wold Newton and married Margaret Whitford in 1868 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, and had three children. He later came back to Wold Newton and died there in 1879. But in 1871 was living in Nottinghamshire.

3. Charles French (b. 1840 in Wold Newton) was a shepherd and later a farm labourer. In 1868 he married Emma Lusby in Swallow and had two sons (Charles and Robert). Emma died in 1871, leaving Charles single and living in Wold Newton, about 8 miles from Louth. In 1881 he remarried to Mary Ann Mumby (his first cousin) and had another five children (Henry, George, Percy, Mary and Harriet). His youngest child was born in 1900, when he was 60. Charles certainly lived an itinerant sort of life. His children’s birthplaces show this: Hatcliffe, Ashby cum Fenby, Wold Newton, Binbrook, Leigh in Rutland, Babworth, Burton Coggles. Judging by FindMyPast’s excellent newspaper archives he seems to have fallen out with a few landlords and had to move on to the next village. He even started calling himself William Charles French on the odd occasion. In 1910, aged 70, he got into a bit of trouble after attacking a farm foreman with a hay fork. Here is a clipping from the Boston Guardian (23rd July 1910):

I don’t know why but I sort of have a hunch that Charles French was Annie’s father.

But hunches are very unscientific! William also lived near Louth and Elijah may have been back in the area by 1873. I am afraid the situation is complicated even further. Robert and Harriet French’s eldest daughter Maria French (b. 1824 in Wold Newton) had also mothered three sons who were just about the right age in 1873 to have maybe fathered Annie. Maria married John Wright (1824-1907) in 1848 and their sons were:

1. William Wright (b. 1853 in Ashby cum Fenby). In 1871 William was living in Grainsby, a hamlet about 8 miles away from Louth. He was working as a waggoner. In 1876 he married Charlotte Lambert and had four children.

2. Charles Wright (b. 1856 in Ashby cum Fenby). In 1871 Charles was living in Weelsby, an area that is now part of Grimsby and is about 14 miles away from Louth. He died in 1876.

3. Thomas Wright (b. 1857 in Ashby cum Fenby). In 1871 he was living with his parents in Ashby cum Fenby and was 13 years old. He later married and had two daughters.

The presence of the Wright brothers certainly throws a spanner in the works. But I have yet to identify any shared DNA matches from their father’s side of the family. If those matches were to materialise I would have concrete proof that none of the French brothers were Annie’s father. But right now I (very sadly) have to remain doubtful about each of my candidates.

On uncovering this DNA evidence I assumed that I was probably the first to have learned that Annie was very probably part of the extended French-Mumby clan, thinking that Annie may not have known her own biological father’s identity.

This does not seem to be the case. The other day I traced back a strong match from my DNA on 23&Me and found that they were the grandchild of Robert Kirmond (b. 1873 in Hawerby). Robert Kirmond was the son of John Kirmond and Harriet French, the youngest daughter of Robert French and Harriet Mumby. This would have made Robert Kirmond the first cousin of Annie Pape. In the 1901 census, Robert Kirmond was working as a railway porter and was listed as a lodger in his cousin’s house.

This indicates that Annie knew her father and kept in contact with her father’s extended family to the extent that her cousin came to stay with her family when they were born in their late 20s. If only someone had passed down the information!

Although I have to sit tight and wait for new DNA matches that may prove whether the French or Wright brothers fathered my great-great-grandmother, I hope this article has been useful in showing how DNA analysis can move a family historian much closer to identifying the wider family to which their illegitimate ancestor belonged.

Useful tools that may help your own research:

1. Ancestry holds great Bastardy Orders records. Here are links to those of Warwickshire, West Yorkshire and Dorset. 

2. FindMyPast’s excellent newspaper archives will fill in more details about your family’s daily lives than any census record. Might help to find your illegitimate ancestor’s biological father. (Just getting a fourteen day free trial may illuminate an awful lot).

3. Ginger S. Frost, a research professor of history at Samford University, has written an excellent book called ‘Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860-1930’ which will provide some great context to your research.