I was quite shocked to see on the baptism register for one of my forebears the workd 'illegitimate' written by the vicar. Not a mere blank. That was in 1902. A previous illegitimate baby to the same mother 4 yrs earlier resulted in her taking the father to court, and this sort of thing can be found in Presentments at the museum library. In this case, the father denied my relative, and got away with it, paying out nothing, but I think he was lying. No wonder the mother did not give a father's name on her second child. Glad to report both daughters did well in life. My understanding is however that the vicars/priests made it their business to know who the father was.

A word of warning though, from my experience above, the children may take on the names of a subsequent stepfather, and it may not be an official name change, but they will be known by the adopted name, and this can cause havoc in research. One of the above children emigrated, and by sheer chance I found her on the passenger list, having given her adopted surname, name, not birth name, gave her Manx nationality as English, and emigrated from Manchester not IOM.

Stemming from this I wonder what future family historians will make of the new shortened word for Mancunians, ie Mancs?

More recently, as I was looking in the births for the 1940s, I noticed that there were twins born and the father's name blank, but outside the printed register columns, by the fold in the book, where I have noticed comments made on rare occasions, there was a comment that the children were re-registered with the father's name under some Act which unfortunately I cannot remember. I think it was to do with the parent s subsequently marrying, bearing in mind that this was war time. Sorry to be vague, as it wasn't an entry that concerned my research, I wasn't overly interested, only enough to catch my eye at the time.