Speaking as someone who was illegitimate and given away to foster parents at 2 weeks old, I can testify how dreadful it was growing up with that stigma. Many years later I met my real mother and discovered what a lovely person she was and how dreadful the pressure was when she discovered that she was pregnant. Her parents were completely unsupportive and said she could only return home without the baby.
She really didn't feel that she could raise me on her own, my father having fled.
This was in the late 1930's.
Thank goodness that no such stigma now exists and it doesn't matter two hoots whether your parents are married or not.

My SIL was adopted in the 1960s and her story is very sad. Her mother was the daughter of a serving officer and the girl got pregnant by an 'unsuitable' Turkish man. She ran away to London with him and had the baby. The man went to prison leaving her and the baby penniless and she was given an ultimatum by her middle class, respectable parents:- give up the baby for adoption and you can come home. So the baby was given away and adopted at the age of 14 months.

The adoption was never really successful as the new parents were old and old fashioned, having adopted her as a sister for a son who had arrived in their 40's. My SIL was a bit wild as a child (genes?) and ended up running away at the age of 13 and then attempting suicide.

My SIL had two daughters by different fathers and brought them up herself on benefits. She reconciled with her adopted parents but relations were difficult as they were never really compatible. She sought her birth mother and found her but the mother, having become highly respectable and now having two adult sons who knew nothing of their half sister, rejected her for the second time. My SIL, in my opinion never got over this. It was truly cruel.

The final chapter is surprising. This Christmas my DH had a letter from his sister, my SIL, to say that her Turkish father had traced her and is eager to see her. She has many half brothers and sisters and she is corresponding with one of the sisters and will meet her. I couldn't be happier for my SIL though it is all a bit late as she has had her mental health wrecked by the whole sorry business. Nevertheless, her daughters are lovely and she has four grand daughters whom she loves.

The worried face of that baby in the photograph! Says it all.

Of course there was stigma about this in the 1960s. My sister fell pregnant towards the end of that decade when she was just 19. She and her then boyfriend must have sorted it out between them (quite mature, come to think of it) because they hastily got married early in March and the baby was born in August, I am her only sister (and was her bridesmaid) and was completely in the dark, didn't know a thing. It was never mentioned again. Now when I look at her wedding photos, it is clear that she had a little bulge, the "Princess line" dress was wonderful at hiding things. My gran made the dress! So she must have known.

Weird. I shall ask my sister, now long divorced, about it when I see her again.

I'm going to ruffle more than a few feathers here. Yes, I totally agree that attitudes in former decades were cruel and inhuman. Although it wasn't always the case - in the mid-fifties a second cousin, through ignorance and naivety, became pregnant and her parents helped bring up the child until she eventually married some ten years later (not to the unknown father).
But I do get riled at the irresponsible way in which single women get pregnant without the financial means to care properly for the child, apart from benefits. Within my extended family a couple have been together for twenty years or more, three children, and remain unmarried because they can't afford the sumptuous wedding which seems to be so necessary nowadays. Madness! Obviously the term 'illegitimate' is outdated as a cruel stigma on children who through no fault of their own were born to unmarried parents, but if Mum and Dad aren't married then why should their children do otherwise - marriage leads to a more stable society (and no I'm not a Tory!). I suppose n future everyone will have a double-barrelled surname.... (

I remember Eveline Home. And how the National Home for the Unmarried Mother and her Child was always put forward. I used to wonder what that home was like. So glad my family was poor but loving.

That baby's got wind.

jing

I don't doubt for one minute about the stigma, but on reflection what I find strange is that I started school in 1965 and throughout my entire school life in Scotland and England, I don't remember anyone who was from a single parent family. In Scotland I lived on a council estate and attended the local RC schools, so it's not as if I had a privileged upbringing. But children can be so cruel and yet I don't remember anyone being picked on for being illegitimate or not having a Dad around. Being poor and wearing the 'wrong' clothes, etc., yes, but not for being illegitimate. I must ask my Mum about this subject to see if she can jog my memory.

I can remember a local family being rehoused (from a council house) to a town 3miles away when their daughter got pregnant. She must have been about 15. We lived in a small village and everyone knew all about it. This would have been circa 1950.

Maybe it depended on the social circle of the family involved. Where I was living in the 60s I don't think there was much of a stigma, but there were a lot of "shotgun weddings".

I suspect that is what happened around me TriciaF. When I was at school, it was unusual to have older parents, so perhaps some parents 'had' to get married.

I can remember a close friend of mine in 1965 gathering her small group of pals together and saying in an embarrassed voice, 'Our Anne's getting married 'cos she has to', and we were all quite shocked (we'd have been 13). There were several girls, or their older sisters, who this happened to over the next 5 years or so - without thinking hard I can remember five or six. Most of these marriages ended fairly soon. There were a couple of cases where the girl did not get married (too young, I think, in one case; possibly the man was already married in the other), and while this was a seen as a Terrible Thing, people got over it, and the girls kept their babies. So I think attitudes were softening a bit by then.

The tale above of the couple who had to hide the date they were married is one that made me think of my friend and her parents. Her mother and father would have got married in the late 40s and the mother was already pregnant. But she never told any of her family until she was in her late 80s and a widow - she had to wait until her husband died before she felt she could 'confess' to her brood of adult children, who of course did not mind a bit, and were just sad it had been a source of agony and secrecy all those years. My friend said her parents never celebrated their wedding anniversary though they were married for over 60 years and so could have done the whole silver, golden and platinum thing.

I remember a school friend who was rather prim, and whose father was a very respectable leading light of the town business community. For some reason the class had to bring in our birth certificates for some red tape or other, and of course we all unfolded them to read. She was very puzzled - someone must have got her parents' marriage date a year out. Then light began to dawn and she sat silent and very embarrassed.

Oddly enough, an old friend of my parents had known her father as a delivery boy on a bicycle, and I had already heard that "That X was always a cheeky blighter as a lad!"

Wilma I was also brought up in a small Scottish village, attending the village school. I would also have asserted that there were no 'illegitimate' children in the school but having grown up and remained in the area I learned that things were slightly more complicated. I was born in 1946 so pupils further up the school were war-time babies and I think it was this fact that ensured that these children and their mothers were not condemned - rather regarded as 'casualties of war'. The cover stories were pretty thin eg. the woman (with one 20something Daughter in the Army), who suddenly produced a baby son when she was 50 y.o. The single woman who having been visiting her married sister for a few months, returned to bring up (allegedly) her sister's baby, because her sister had too many to cope with! However unlikely the villagers colluded and repeated these stories, by the time we realised that they could not be true it was old news and no one was bothered.

Some stories were more straightforward - fiancés killed in the war, Polish Soldiers who returned to Poland at war's end. Some young women simply claimed to be War Widows and wore a wedding ring.

Illegitimate children used to go to great lengths to hide it from classmates. Or at least, this one did. And I hate myself for that now.

We are all products of our times JBF until we know better.

My paternal grandmother was an unmarried 18 yr old when she had my dad in 1915. She had been living in Liverpool and was shipped off to her step mothers sister in Leicester. She came from a "respectable family" and her father had worked his way up from an office boy to be chief cashier of a shipping company. In a awy
My father was left with foster parents who I think were found as the foster mother worked as a domestic in the same house as the step mothers sister.

My grand mother was sent back to Liverpool afterwards. When WW2 started she wrote to my father at what was his foster parents address and the letter was eventually sent on to him at his lodgings.

My Dad met up with his mum a few times as he stayed in Britain in a reserved occupation. They lost touch again I think when my grandmother married a Welsh man she had got to know well when staying nearby on several holidays.
I suspect that even in the late 1940s she would not have ever felt able to own up to having had an illegitimate child.

I fostered babies in the late 60s and early 70s before the abortion act was passed. One baby came from a very good home but the mother's father would not let her keep her baby. At that time there was little help for her . She thought about long term fostering for the baby but gave in and had her adopted. I met the new parents and they were lovely and besotted by this bright baby. Other babies came from less well off homes .I got them at a week old until they were adopted at about two months . Many a tear was shed when they left .The abortion act made a huge difference to the amount of babies to be adopted .I would love to know what happened to my babies.

I am another who was illegitimate - my mother had me in a Mother & Baby Unit that was some 20 miles from her home town. I wasn't given up for adoption though, as my mother possibly thought that my father would change his mind about marrying her (he didn't and went to work abroad to underline that decision).
I spent my early baby days living with my uncle and his wife, who already had a couple of children. Then they had another one on the way, my mother got herself a residential job as a housekeeper, and I was put into a children's home.
My mother got pregnant again (she had enduring mental health problems ... not sure if this was present then or as a result of her erratic life) and that child was placed for adoption.
A couple of years down the line I had foster parents who wanted to adopt me but my mother had managed to find herself a husband and claimed me back again. She told me about my father but said she had married 'by proxy' via the telephone. As a youngster I believed what she told me and the penny only dropped when I was around 15, when I used the word 'illegimate' in casual conversation, only to be told to never to use it again.

jing I think that's my point really. There must have been illegitimate children around me and I didn't know about it because of how well it was hidden. I can only think of one girl at secondary school who came from a single parent family and I thought her Mum was a widow. But I suspect that's because being at RC schools attached to churches, couples probably married young because that was the done thing if the girl got pregnant. As children we were never interested in wedding dates or anniversaries, so illegitimacy would never come up. It would take some malicious gossip or something. I can imagine families moving house and children changing schools to avoid people finding out.

My best friend's husband was adopted and left it until he was in his 50s and both his parents had died before trying to trace his biological parents. Finding his mother was quite easy because she still lived in the same house all those years later, but she didn't want to have anything to do with him. She'd never told her husband and family. She was in her 80s and I can only imagine how she felt being contacted after so many years. I wonder how many women who gave up babies for adoption lived in fear of being contacted about the adoption?

my DD who died 12 years ago left me her legacy E now 17 in 2 weeks, born 1999,I have just realised that she is illegitimate..

jing for your 14:05:59 post big hug xx

A warm hug for you, too, down to earth. x

I had my first two DD's 'out of wedlock'. DD1 was born in the UK and nobody really batted an eyelid, but when I had DD2 in Malta, I was treated as the lowest of the low. It was an awful experience and DD2's birth certificate had 'illegitimate' stamped across it in bright red ink, although this was arranged after DH and I were married.

My mother also had her first DD six years before she was married. We only discovered this when my sister was 60 and we were doing a bit of digging into the family history.
We felt we couldn't ask mother about it as she had kept her secret for so long, but I would love to know how she pulled it off.
My father was Canadian, married to someone else and it took him six years to sort himself out, but he did return to the UK to marry her. It was 1945 when many had no choice but to give up their babies, so I am very curious as to how mum managed.

My friend got pregnant in 1968 when she was 15. She confided in me, but I was sworn to secrecy. I begged her to let me tell my mum because she would have helped. My friend carried on as if it wasn't happening. Her parents must have realised when she got really big and they took her on a months holiday, so the neighbours wouldn't see. Then she was sent to a Mother and Baby unit until the birth. The baby was adopted and my friend has had no contact in all these years. Such a sad story.

Wonder when this all started, it seems to be at a time when people became 'middle class' in the 19th century the aristocracy didn't have illegitimate children, they toured Europe instead ! And could afford a visit to Harley Street, the poor had their babies, the mothers went back to work and the grandparents brought up the child

Good for you Marelli, I am so glad you were stubborn, and kept your baby. It is so sad, what women had to do, and so wrong, and cruel, my heart goes out to all who had to do this, Thank goodness, that times have changed!!
How nasty was Ms Home,, Bellanonna? Women wrote in, for help, not to be shown up, and accused of being selfish! If Ms Home knew the facts of life, then she should know that it takes two!!!! OOOH that makes my blood boil,, Rant over xxxx My little sister, fell pregnant at the age of sixteen, and my mother hit the roof, (she was with the father) and made her have an abortion. Now my sister is in her early forties, engaged, but no children, and she said she never would have any. I think deep down, she never really came to terms with having to have an abortion, I remember going to my parents( I had moved out) and my mother was crying , when I asked what the matter was, she replied, " Its your sister,she is pregnant. What will the neighbours say?" Not giving a thought to how my sister was feeling, all she cared about was the neighbours, and this was in the 80s!! It was all about how it made my mother look!