My aunt had a baby several years before she was married in the early 1870s. Family members had always assumed that the baby was the child of the aunt’s eventual husband. Court records indicated that the “early” child was not the child of the eventual husband, but was instead the child of another man who left shortly after he learned my aunt was pregnant.
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This is the exact situation my cousins and I are facing. Our grandfather, Jesse, was born in 1874 to Flora, living in Schuyler County, Illinois. She was 20 years old. The father acknoweldged the child, and 18 years later paid his way through college. Those records no longer exist.
Flora married a young man from a neighboring farm in 1877. The story told by Jesse’s children was that the step father adopted him (no court record). Jesse is listed with incorrect birth dates on Ancestry and Family Search. He died in 1944. One of his sons had documentation of the name of the biological father, and correspondence between father and son. At the son’s death in 1970, the 2 surviving children, my mother and an uncle, destroyed all the paperwork that would have allowed us to trace this line of our heritage. They then refused to pass on any any information that would give us a clue where to look.
Sad.
Don’t ever, ever destroy documents proving heritage. Your descendents, as my cousins and I do, may well consider such acts of destruction an unforgiveable crime committed against the entire family.
I was shocked when after several years of working on the family tree, my father casually mentioned that Grandpa Walters is not your grandmother’s real father ….. what ? wait? Grandma!!!!! Yes honey dear, he adopted us when he married momma. So after a conversation or two, I asked her .. you have everything from your mom’s side of the family including your real father’s buttons and sergeants stripes off of his uniform, but there is nothing from grandpa’s side of the family why? ” Well Honey Dear, you were not born yet, and we did not know that you were going to want it so we burned it ….. ( insert a primal scream here ) . Also, his one brother’s house burned to the ground also .. so my family history was consumed by fire … on both sides.
My Aunt wrote me a letter telling me how she wasn’t the daughter of my grandfather. She said when she was born her father was overseas in WWI. Her family sent her mother to live in Virginia with family where she had the baby. That was in 1917. She told me that she had met her real father when she was a young girl and that they had gone fishing together. I found a newspaper ad from about 1959 where a man from the home town of my grandmother’s family was looking for her. I’m not sure if she ever knew about the ad. Since she never had any children of her own, it doesn’t matter much that the man’s name is “lost”. But it intrigues me.
I can easily see how it would intrigue you. That’s an interesting story.