Skeletons In Cupboards
The permissive society was supposed to have started in the 1960s. Oh no, it didn't! It's anybody's guess what went on before that but everybody's family tree throws up some evidence of scandal by the norms of those days. If a girl had an illegitimate child she was in disgrace and all sorts of measures were in place to try to conceal the fact. Pregnant girls were sent away to have the child which was then adopted or the girl would suddenly have a wee brother or whatever. Sometimes, especially in isolated areas in Scotland, it was accepted behaviour to prove the girl was fertile before marriage but this was the exception. Normally, the girl would be "the talk of the steamie". We have examples of illegitemacy in all branches and that's just those we know about.
Allan Old (born 1875) was a very holy man, always reading his bible and preaching good behaviour to others according to my own father. However, he had a dark secret. He was the father of several children, Allan (1896), Rachel (1898), John (1901), Walter (1903), my Grandfather Alexander (1906), Mary (1908) and William (1911) but wait a minute; he was only married in 1898! In fact it was the 29th of April 1898. This means that Allan was illegitimate and Rachel, appearing June 27th, was conceived a long time before the marriage. It gets worse though. The 1911 census shows first-born Allan staying with the rest of the family but he was missing in the 1901 census. Where could he be? Well, he was staying with his Granny in Bonnyrigg. Why? A look at his birth certificate shows that his mother isn't noted as Mary Beaton but Jane Beaton. This isn't a mistake. It's Mary's sister, known as Jessie, and Allan is staying with his real mother.
So what this means is that he had both sisters pregnant before he was married. A bit hypocritical, preaching good behaviour while behaving badly himself!
The Anderson line has a example even closer in time as my grandmother Catherine (Kate) Kelly was illegitimate, a fact that she found very embarassing. Naturally it wasn't her fault but there was a stigma attached to illigitimacy in those days. No father was mentioned on the birth certificate which means that further research in that parental line is impossible. I have a theory as to who the father could have been but even that hits a problem as it was an Irishman and the trail of records just disappears, as do so many from Ireland.
The Mackay tree has two cases of illigitimacy in the mid 1800s. George Bruce was born to Janet Macadie in a croft in Caithness in around 1840. Janet was still single when she married farmer David Sinclair a few years later but George Bruce went with her. It seems that it was an open secret that the father was David Bruce, a ship carpenter from Thurso and he contributed a surname and some joinery skills to his illegitimate son.
Mary Ann Lawrence, though, is a bit more tarnished. The daughter of a chainmaker in Aberdeen harbour, she was the mother of Alice Mackay to Thomas Mackay, a seaman she doesn't seem to have married. Worse still, Mary Ann was in Aberdeen Penitentiary in 1851, which strongly suggests either criminal activity or an illegitimate birth long before Alice's unrecorded birth in 1855. Of all the genealogical research I have undertaken I have never come across such a difficult case as Mary Ann. From her spell in the Penitentiary in 1851 to positive identifications in 1901 and again in 1911 and at her death in 1920 there was no confirmed sighting of her until I found an Edinburgh marriage to Fredrik Johansen, a Norwegian sailor, in 1871. Even then, she doesn't appear in that year's census in the address she gave. As a sailor's wife she could have been in England or even abroad or on a boat. Who knows? Mysterious.
On Sandra's other tree, her maternal grandfather was illegitimate. This one involved a bit of detective work as the Albert Brember I was looking for turned out to be John Martin! From other documents I knew that I was looking for his mother, Janet Martin, and I found her in the 1891 census with a four day old baby named John Martin. By the time she registered the boy he was Albert Martin and after a Sheriff Court Order William McLaren was named as the father and Albert now took on the surname McLaren. Within the year she had married Andrew Brember and Albert became Albert Brember. Four names in one year must be some sort of record.
There are other illegitimacies but to round off the list of ignominies we have an ancestor who ended up in a lunatic asylum. Alexander Allison was a shoemaker and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that inhaling glue all of his working life may have caused his problems. He was definitely an inmate though and not just making shoes for the others. The official reports have been located and he was there for his and others' safety!