Illegitimacy in Ireland
 

This morning I must have looked at over 200 pages of birth registrations in Ireland between around 1890 and 1920. I realise having an illegitimate child was a scandal and some mother's were shipped off to England etc. There are 10 births to a page so I will have scanned past perhaps 2000 registrations without seeing anything other than two parents and a mmn recorded.

Any thoughts?

If a teenage girl got into trouble, a lot of families passed the baby off as a late addition to the family of her parents.

A lot were sent to England they would be registered here and of course Scotland but I have always had a suspicion that if they were born in Ireland in one of those places they usually called unmarried mother homes that they were sold or given to others including Americans and fraudulently registered in their names rather than the mother's name and the establishment were complicit in that practice, the Catholic Church or any denomination were very powerful in Ireland.

From a PDF I read from Queen's University:

"The rate of ‘illegitimate’ births in Ireland was extremely low compared to other countries. In 1911 the Irish figure was just over half of the English rate and onethird of the rate in Scotland. In the late nineteenth century the illegitimacy rate in Sweden was six times that in Ireland."

I agree with Maggie. I can't imagine any f amily that would allow their daughter to register an illegitimate birth. I also know that the church actively lied and connived and as Maggie says, registered (if at all) the babies in the adoptive parents names, saved so much bother and was a very good earner for the church.connived

Baptisms might show something different but it seems unlikely. Illegitimate children belonged to the State in Ireland so the State (i.e. The Church) could do what it liked with them.

OC

All that makes perfect sense, but not what I want to hear.

Do you also think registration in ordinary working class families in Ireland was more hit and miss than in the rest of the UK? I seem to have several families in Irish cities who registered more than half of their children, but certainly not all or even most of them. The missing ones don't look like the children of older daughters, so I wondered if they could be illegitimate children of cousins etc? Seems unlikely as all the neighbours would notice if Mrs X managed three children in under three years and didn't show for the middle one!

Have you looked in the English GRO?

I have read somewhere that civil registration was hit and miss in Ireland for many years, so I don't think it's suspicious that many are missing in the records.

OC

OK, but that's very unsatisfactory!

Can't quote any stats here as I didn't bother to collect them at the time, but when I was trawling parish baptisms,(RC) illegitimate births were shown as such. State registration of births did not occur until 1864, if I remember correctly but certainly there seemed to be a more casual attitude towards it than in the UK. My OH's grandfather, born in Donegal, was baptized (Presbyterian) several months before his aunt got around to registering the birth....and then fudged the date of birth (to avoid the fine, I think)
By and large, the Irish considered baptism of far more importance than registration. I have found baptismal records for each of my Ryans from Tipperary, but few were registered.

I don't like it when people fudge things to suit their own purposes!

Having moved on from illegitimate people, I have found this on Ancestry:

Ireland, Civil Registration Births Index, 1864-1958

Name: Mary Cunningham
Date of Registration: Jan-Feb-Mar 1899
Registration District: Cork
Birth Country: Ireland
Volume: 5
Page: 145
FHL Film Number: 101067

But I can't find it on the irishgenealogy.ie site to pick up the full details. I've tried all sorts of searching to no avail. Can anyone else find it please?