Affiliation Orders / Bastardy Bonds

[Megan Roberts]

A useful but sometimes frustrating source for finding these is to search old newspapers. There are a few tips that I want to share with others as it may help them:

1. If you are looking for an unusual name, don't limit your search to the papers local to that vicinity, because if there was a particularly notorious case, or one that offered scandal it may well have been reported on a much wider scale. For instance in 1848 the Pembrokeshire Herald and General Advertiser reports the case of the Vicar of Mottram, Cheshire who was brought to court in Hyde, by an unnamed woman. He lost the original case, appealed and won.

2. If you don't have an unusual name search using terms such as "affiliation" or "bastard" because although they can produce a large number of hits, there will be less that if you are looking for "Smith". Its also worth considering limiting the year range of the search.

3. It is as common for only the men to be named and not the women as it is for both parties to be named. If you know the year of birth, search on a plus 12 year range, as often men were brought back to court because they were ignoring the original order, or because the woman had fallen on hard times some years after the birth and the Poor Law Guardians were instructing her to take action against the father in order to avoid the financial burden of looking after the woman and her child falling on the parish.

4. Most frustrating of all are those reports which say something along the lines of "the Magistrates were chiefly occupied with hearing the evidence of various unmarried women who applied for orders of affiliation under the provisions of the Bastardy Act against the putative fathers of their children. In some cases orders were granted and in others not." And not one name is listed!! In those instances take a deep breath and silently scream!

[Wilkes_ml]

I hadn't thought to look in newspapers for bastardy orders. What sort of year range are they most likely to be in? Also is there a point in time when they no longer appear in newspapers?

[Megan Roberts]

I haven't really bottomed that one out BUT, from a quick look at the Welsh Newspapers Online site (which is part of the National Library of Wales site and is FREE); which has papers between 1804-1919, and use the search term "bastardy" gives the following results:
1800 – 1809 (1)
1810 – 1819 (3)
1820 – 1829 (10)
1830 – 1839 (200)
1840 – 1849 (144)
1850 – 1859 (229)
1860 – 1869 (819)
1870 – 1879 (636)
1880 – 1889 (502)
1890 – 1899 (517)
1900 – 1909 (287)
1910 – 1919 (45)

If you search "Bastardy Bonds" you get a lot more hits, but they contain both words singularly and together, so its not worth searching on the combined expression. There does not seem to be an advanced search function, but I may have missed that.

[Wilkes_ml]

I'll have to look into it, but I guess the results are based on how good the word recognition programme is. I've seen the "interpretation" of the newspapers on FMP, and it looks like complete gobbledigook to me, but will give it a shot.

[cicilysmith]

In Lancashire Archives there are some online bastardy orders under Marriage Licences and I have found others in the Gale collection of newpapers through Lancashire Libraries. What puzzles me is I have never found the same case in both sources. It's made me much readier to believe that some girls got pregnant by the same man two or three times before he got round to marrying them. cicilysmith

[Wilkes_ml]

I tried searching FMP newspapers using the word "bastardy" and got 30,107 hits....will take me a while to work through those!

[Wilkes_ml]

Having read through a few of the hits, it would appear the quarter sessions are also covered (some in more detail than others) and this would also be a good way to get information about settlement disputes.

[Megan Roberts]

A lot of cases appear in the Petty Sessions and Magistrates Courts.

[Clemmie]

Megan,

Do you know how to access the Petty Sessions and Magistrates Courts records? Can that only be done through the LMA?

My grandfather was illegitimate, his mother was living in Ealing at the time, and the historian at the Ealing Library found an article that references a man taken to court on 6 July 1912, a month after my grandfather was born. It does not reference the woman, other than to say she was 19, which would have been the age of my great-grandmother. For various reasons it sounds promising. I need to access that record.

[Megan Roberts]

I am afraid I don't, other than to the extent that the sessions are reported in newspapers.

Its probably worth an email to the LMA to ask if they can help.