Friends, This discussion is very interesting to me. Among other preoccupations, I’m a researcher of European Anabaptists, as some of my ancestors were Mennonites in Switzerland, Germany and France before emigrating to the US. The dominant Catholic Church in France, for instance, didn’t recognize Anabaptist marriages, and also the Anabaptists had adopted a rather tolerant attitude (or so it seems) toward illegitimate children, so it’s hard to sort out if there was shaming around this or not. The children born out of wedlock or to parents whose marriages weren’t recognized, were labeled as illegitimate in the civil records post-Napoleon —before that the only records in France were kept by the Catholic Church. Since I don’t research the few Protestants and Jews in France (let alone unbelievers), I'm not sure what the case was with them.
One set of my Irish ancestors — one Protestant, one Catholic — fled Ireland for Canada because of family outrage. They married as Catholics in Quebec Province but only after having a child. That child was reared without incident, so far as I know. What the presiding priest said is not known. A lecture? I’m also a writer about the history of the West in the US before and after the California Gold Rush. In the earliest period in CA there were few births, period, since the population was largely male. After that, the culture of the Eastern US was adopted, and people hid the truth about children born “without benefit of clergy”, sometimes attributing them to married siblings or the grandparents. The children themselves appear to have been loved and cared for. However, there were escaped black slaves in those communities also, whom the censuses reveal didn’t know who their fathers were. And then there were the Native Americans, who didn’t keep written records about paternity or maternity. And the ticklish issue of prostitutes, who sometimes had children. It’s a mixed bag, most of it shrouded in mystery. The worst thing, in my eyes, is taking out cultural prejudices on the children, who had no say (nor have now, nor ever will) in how they got to this earth! Keep it coming. Katie Green _______________________________________________ CoTyroneList Mailing List Mailing List Email Address: CoTyroneList@cotyroneireland.com Change Your Preferences: http://cotyroneireland.com/mailman/listinfo/cotyronelist_cotyroneireland.com Mailing List Archive: https://goo.gl/mQCKrY
