Report by Kate Hurst

Family historians are a creative bunch - as anyone who has ever attempted to solve a puzzle in their family history will know, you can’t always link one branch of a tree to another immediately, especially where illegitimate ancestors are concerned...

Although meetings are suspended for now, Ormskirk and District Family History Society are as keen as ever to keep in touch with their members (and anyone else who takes an interest in their family’s past), so they began plans for their third “virtual talk” by offering their Facebook followers a few different choices of subject.

This led to “Illegitimacy In Your Family Tree”, a 30-minute video that combines the different ways that the children of unmarried parents were described in literature and in historical documents with some suggestions on how more unusual resources (e.g. newspapers and quarter sessions records) can be used to learn more about the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equivalent of child maintenance payments.

Despite the fact that every case of children born to unmarried parents through history will always be slightly different (and will result from different circumstances), Ormskirk and District Family History Society hopes that their virtual talk will, nevertheless, be useful to anyone with an interest in this aspect of social history, whether or not they are researching their own family tree.

The video can be found at the link below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEIL5egIGHg