Praise for the GRO

I was gobsmacked on Christmas Eve, when two marriage certificates dropped through my letter box, why? Because I had only ordered them on the 20th December and the expected date for sending had been the 29th December! Brilliant service and so exciting for me as it showed one of my Husbands ancestors had divorced her Husband for desertion in 1945. He going on to be a big wig in the Army and receive the OBE and other awards.
I also found a snippet in a newspaper about the divorce case which said where they married in what year and more importantly that there was a child of the marriage, although it did not name or say what sex the child was.
It kept me occupied all evening searching

 

I also had an email from them that day, but the news was not so good. With the help of the new birth search I thought I had finally tracked down the marriage of my 5X G Grandparents I narrowed the search to the first quarter of BMD records and ordered the certificate. The email advised me that though both the people were on that page they had not married each other so my fee was refunded.
I am now back to searching for a Davies Williams marriage in 2 counties of Wales or 2 English counties and possibly before registration began, made more complicated by the birth of the first 2 children are missing the other seven are registered, the second I have a baptism for but no GRO reference to either.

 

HeHe, that seems almost to be a prerequisite with some of my ancestors.

 

This probably doesn't fit here, but I thought I'd share it. I have seen many postings where people's elderly relatives will not discuss illegitimacy or are quite distressed by it, even in the distant past. Well, I can show you at least one instance where an elderly relative took it all in her stride.

I was talking to my mother about some of my recent discoveries in our tree. One of the things I had to tell her was that one direct ancestress (named Christian) seems to have had 3 children before her marriage (by all indications they were also children of her future husband Joshua) and was pregnant at the time of her wedding. Moreover, Christian's sister Phoebe seems (on the basis of names given to her 2 youngest children) to have had one child in her widowhood by her eldest son's brother-in-law and another quite possibly by Joshua (her brother-in law).

The reason I thought this worth sharing was not the shenanigans (others of you doubtless have irregularities) but that my 93 year old mother was highly amused by all this.

 

I too have found quite a few births of children before marriage. After reading fiction set in England and/or
Scotland in the 1700's and 1800's, could some instances be a result of "hand fasting" or something similar?

 

Or even worse, if a person was 'in service' they needed their employers permission to marry, or even go out with someone. A refusal to allow a marriage would quickly change to loss of home and work with the freedom to marry if a girl turned up pregnant. So getting pregnant was in some cases the only way out.