Genealogy Chat

I've got a lot of illegitimate ancestors.......2x great grandmother was one of 6 illegitimate children of my 3x great granny. There seem to be quite a lot of them on all sides of the family and it doesn't surprise me at all these days. I think my very strait-laced grandmother might have been a bit upset if she'd lived to see what I've dug up. I think anyone starting their family tree should be given a warning that they will probably uncover secrets and possibly unpleasant facts like criminal records for some ancestors. Sue

40 years ago my mother and her sister [my Aunt] created quite a fuss when I got pregnant before I married. When I started to do the family tree I said to my Aunt that I couldn't work out who her fathers parents were as he and his brother were reared by their grandparents. She replied, Oh it's x and she married y, we carried on talking about other things and she suddenly said but y wasn't their father, the father is said to have been the local mill owners son and both brothers were born on the same date just one year apart. Sure enough the fathers name is absent on the birth cert. I wish I had known this 40 years ago.