Registration of birth procedure in the 1920's

[Lensgirl]

Hi

I have been desperately searching on the link between myself and a DNA match. using all the information we have for our joined DNA matches we have narrowed it down using the probability tool on DNA painter, to her father being the child of a relative of ours. She has a high match (460cm) and this link would match with them being half cousins.

The only possible way is that her father was the child of the relative, but he grew up with another family and my DNA match doesn't have any matches on this families side at all except for a photo where her dad looks like his grandfather (paternal). So my thought is that he was the product of an affair between the woman relative to me and the man he grew up with.

Probably sounds stupidly convoluted! however, his birth registration has both parents listed. Could, a birth be registered with the incorrect mother/parents?

What makes this a little bit more bizarre is that he grew up in Kent, yet moved to London and my match lived literally down the road from her half cousin

[Sylvia C]

I think it was possible for a woman to say she was the mother of the child if she wasn't ............. eg, child born in a small nursing home or at home and handed over immediately to the "adoptive" mother.

But this means that if she was the wife of the putative father, that she was fully aware of the affair and willing to take care of the child of the "other woman".

Probably (??certainly) not legal, but I think it could happen

Do you have the man's birth certificate?

The other possibility is that his birth might have been registered by the mother, then there was a re-registration by the "adoptive" parents? In that case, I think there might be 2 birth certificates, and I think the one with the changes would then take precedence over the first.


Someone will tell me if I am wrong!

[Olde Crone Holden]

All I can say is that adoption has nothing to do with birth registration. A birth can only be registered once. A legal adoption produces a certificate of adoption which over rides the original birth certificate. Adoption registers are nothing to do with birth registers, deliberately so. Formal adoption did not start until 1927.

Of course people have always broken the law so anything is possible! I have an instance in my tree in 1846 where the child's uncle and aunt registered the child as their own. They could not have been his natural parents because their own baby had recently died and the baptism register proved he was the illegitimate child of a relative who died at the child's birth.

OC

[Lensgirl]

Thanks OC. I still keep coming back to the fact that her grandparent must be the one. There is the other option that whilst she "knows" her dad is her biological dad, having absolutely no matches to that side (including a second cousin she knows about), that perhaps he isn't. however that is not my place to say or speculate