Going round in circles!
 

If you were born in Ireland (Cork) and emigrated to the UK after 1920 would you have needed a passport?

If yes, I presume you would have needed a birth cert to obtain a passport?

And if you were not registered, might you have got away with using the birth cert of someone else with the same name?

I also may have one baby morphing into two people, one in the UK and one in the US! It sounds like an Ancestry tree, but these are real people!!

Time for a lie down?

I don't think you would have needed a passport, and I don't think you would need a birth cert to get an Irish passport in 1920 because there must have been lots of Irish people living then whose births hadn't been registered. But I don't know this for sure.

British passports seem to have come into general being in 1914 as a sheet of paper until 1921 when it became a passport as we know it but Irish passports not issued until 1924.

https://assets.publishing.service.go.../passports.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_...20the%20centre.

It's very frustrating. Three siblings in America say someone is their sister and living in the UK. The only person with that name and the only person with the correct husband has a dob on the 1939 register and the same date on their death record. There is a birth in Ireland with the wrong parents but matching date of birth. That child lived with their biological parents in 1901and died aged 6 in 1906.

I should be ignoring it but am finding it difficult to do that!

I know the problems especially in Ireland.

Several ancestry trees has my b.father dying in the US aged 6 - he never went there as far as I know. His parents names were correct though.

Friend also had an uncle in Ireland but how he came to live with them she never knew or who his blood family was but was accepted as part of the family.

I also have a 1901 census saying someone was the adopted daughter of her aunt but legal adoption didn't start until late 1920's.

I believe Irish people would not need a passport to enter Britain in 1920 between 1922 and 1937 it got a bit more complicated because of the founding of the Irish Free State but only from the Irish Free State's point of view I believe the British Government still maintained that anyone born in Ireland was still British. Might be tricky going back lots of animosity.

It wasn't until 1935 that Irish Citizenship and Nationality was created and as late as 1942 there was still some consternation on Irish people born in Ireland before 1935 and living in Britain were actually Irish or British Nationality.

There was a court case involving a man who was conscripted into the British Army in 1942, he lived in Britain but was born in Ireland under British rule.

But correct me if I have that wrong or any dates I haven't checked it was an Irish teacher at school in 1970 telling me about it because the troops had gone into NI in 1969 some things stick in my mind some don't.

Even more frustrating is there are no passenger lists for people travelling from Ireland to mainland Britain.

Of course we now have the CTA and they really only use passports for identification.

The CTA came in in 1922 and there was no proof of identity required.

OK I think I now have two people being born, one leaving Ireland for the US and the other coming to the UK. The UK one wasn't registered for birth and is using the dob of the child from the other family (I wonder if the two father's were brothers? They lived in nearly streets in Cork) - it can't be her real dob as she had a sister born three months later.

So, the two babies born about 1899/1900 were first cousins (fathers were brothers). One was registered and died aged 6 and the other was probably a few months older (to fit between her siblings), wasn't registered and ended up with her cousin's dob!

Also.... the child who lived to adulthood enjoyed a variety of forenames....

Margaret
May
Mae
Martha
Mary
and an additional initial O at her marriage.

The child that died was Mary on her birth cert which is what both babies were listed as in 1901.

I lived and worked in London in the late 60s and it was fairly common for Irish people to swap their identities, according to my friend who worked in payroll. It wasn't being done for criminal purposes, more for a short cut round officildom mostly. I think it would have been even easier before the war.

OC