Widows, the Family Name and Illegitimacy

One thing to watch out for when you're doing your family tree is widows having babies long after their previous husbands have died!  As the widow retains the married name, those children will be baptised and registered with the same surname. They are rarely marked in parish registers as illegitimate, nor would the entry say "single woman".

So, if a married woman has children, make sure you double check their baptism dates against the date of death of her previous husband.  Of course, nothing's as simple as that.  A child can be baptised at any age, so you'd certainly need to dig a little deeper to check if the deceased husband was, in fact, the father and the child simply baptised late.

But that's just something for you to be aware of.  The implications to your family tree, if you're descended from a child born to a widow, is that although the name is in your tree, you're not descended from the family of the deceased.  Your upline stops at the mother, who gave birth to an illegitimate child.

This happened in my tree.  My GG-grandmother was widowed in 1878 and had children born and registered in 1880 and 1883.  Both bore the previous husband's surname, but were not his children!  I therefore have a "rogue" name in the tree that I am not blood-related to.  As these births were registered since 1837, ordering a copy of the birth certificate did show an empty space where the father's name would have been expected.  This is an instance where obtaining an original birth certificate from the GRO helps with accuracy, rather than "guessing" from entirely free sources of information such as FreeBMD.

It's essential you keep your eye on the ball when adding ancestors to the family tree.  You want it to be as accurate as possible and it saves you wasting time chasing records of people you are not related to!  Get original certificates where possible to aid with confusion and ambiguity.

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