Our expert Stephen Rigden, pictured right, answers your questions.

From Ruth Monnier in Brisbane, Australia:

‘I’m wondering if you can help me with a paternity query. I have noticed that in some baptismal registers the father’s name is left blank and it sometimes may also state that the baby was illegitimate. Also, on a birth certificate the name of the father may be missing and the baby has the same surname as the mother.

I’m wondering what the laws and norms were for what surname a baby could legally be given and what had to be written on the birth certificate? Did the parents have to be married for the baby to have the father’s surname? Did the parents have to be married for the baby’s father’s name to be written on the birth certificate? Was the father’s permission needed? It’s obviously different to today.’

Steve says:

‘Thanks very much for your question, Ruth. I can only really speak with regard to English and Welsh birth and baptism registers. My understanding is that, in practice if not in law, the birth of a child would be registered with the names of both parents in three different circumstances.

Firstly, of course, if the parents were legally married. There are some variations on this. For example, a legally married couple in, say, their 40s may present the child as their own legitimate offspring when in fact it was the illegitimate child of their unmarried daughter: they are not the actual parents but the child is registered as if they were. Or a married couple may register the birth or baptism of a child as if it were both of theirs whereas the father may have been a different man; naturally, the husband may or may not know that he is not the father. What we family historians have to work with is the evidence of the documentary record of birth or baptism, which may not necessarily correspond to the actual biological parentage of the child in question.

Secondly, if the mother of the child or both parents purported to be legally married and the registrar (by which I mean either the civil registrar or his/her ecclesiastical equivalent) was none the wiser. In the latter regard, if the registrar suspected that the mother or the parents were not married (for example, if the woman was known to him by repute, or the community was small and the personal circumstances of its inhabitants generally known), presumably he would ask for evidence to be provided and, if not produced to his/her satisfaction, the child would be registered under the mother’s name only (subject to the third circumstance below).

Thirdly, if the parents acknowledged that they were not married but the father accepted paternity and was present, with the mother, at the time of registration. You would then have the father given on the certificate as, for example, John Smith and the mother as Mary Brown. The child’s forenames are given in the appropriate field in the register but there is not a separate dedicated field for the child’s surname. Such children are, therefore, often indexed by the General Register Office in their birth indexes under the surnames of both parents. This is also why, when the registrar does include the surname in the child’s forename field, you tend to get doubling up in the index - i.e., such names as William Smith Smith (probably also indexed as William Smith Brown).

I suspect that the norms varied at different times and with different registrars, communities and faiths. Where illegitimate children were concerned, for example, not a few Calvinist Ministers in Scotland habitually filled their baptism registers with such pitiless phrases as ‘begotten in fornication’.

To summarise, if the name of the father is blank on the certificate, all you can reliably read into this is that his identity is (on the basis of this certificate) unknown to you. In reality, the identity of the father may have been unknown to the mother if there were two or more candidates, as it were; or his identity may have been known to the mother but he himself may have been unaware of his paternity; or he may have denied paternity, righteously or otherwise; or he may have been in a long-term stable or periodic relationship with the mother but was not present at registration.

As for the actual law in these matters, I only have immediately to hand a facsimile reprint of the 1901 ‘Suggestions For The Guidance Of The Clergy Relative To The Duties Imposed Upon Them By The Marriage And Registration Acts’. This is silent on the question of questionable paternity at birth registration. For marriages, however, it gives the following advice:

‘Persons of Illegitimate Birth are sometimes unwilling or unable to state the Name and the Rank or Profession of their Fathers. If, on these Particulars being asked for, there be any hesitation or reluctance to state them, no further inquiry need be made, and Columns 7 and 8 may be left blank; lines in ink should then be drawn through the blank spaces.’

Perhaps there are some findmypast.co.uk readers willing to share details of their own experiences of finding illegitimate ancestors?’

If you’d like to send your question to Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

We’ve picked the winner of our June competition in which we asked you to tell us what year convict Michael Taylor arrived in New South Wales.

We’ve picked our winner at random - congratulations go to Clive Pace from Leeds who correctly answered 1822. Clive wins a six month subscription to Your Family History magazine. Congratulations Clive!

Thanks to all of you who entered - you’ll find July’s competition question in our newsletter this Friday.

To mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain this year, the Battle of Britain Historical Society has organised a commemorative flight over the Battle of Britain area on 28 August 2010 and you could be a part of it.

Findmypast.co.uk is sponsoring the flight, along with the John Lewis Partnership. British Airways have provided an Airbus A320 which will fly the Battle of Britain veterans over the areas in which they fought in their Hurricanes, Spitfires, Blenheims and Defiants in the summer of 1940.

As well as the veterans and their family members, celebrities and TV and press reporters, there are some seats now on offer to members of the public on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. Ticket holders will meet up with the veterans and celebrities at Heathrow at 1pm on Saturday 28 August 2010 for pre-flight drinks and lunch prior to take off at 2.30pm.

The flight will last around two hours and will fly over the Isle of Wight, Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, before proceeding up the English Channel and across the North Sea to the coast of Holland, returning to Heathrow via Belgium and France. Tickets are £475 each, paid for by cheque, or via Visa, Mastercard, Maestro or Switch.

If you’re interested in being a part of this amazing event, please contact Bill Bond M.B.E., General Manager, Battle of Britain Historical Society, Gunthorpe, Melton Constable NR24 2NS. Tel: 01263 861476 or email: billatbobhs@aol.com

Following Monday’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? which featured Bruce Forsyth, we’ve found his ancestors in the census records at findmypast.co.uk. We’re sure you found the programme as fascinating as we did - read on to see Bruce’s controversial great-grandfather in our census records.

Bruce Forsyth

In the 1851 census you can see Bruce’s great-grandfather, Joseph Forsyth Johnson, with his mother and grandfather (a florist/nurseryman – not a gardener as Bruce’s cousin said in the programme). They were living in West Ella, Yorkshire:

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On the 1861 census you can see Joseph Forsyth Johnson (employed as a gardener) again living with his wife Elizabeth and her parents in Gilling, Yorkshire:

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The 1881 census shows Elizabeth (working as a housekeeper) with children, living in Wilmslow, Cheshire. Joseph Forsyth Johnson was not with the family:

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Elizabeth appears again on the 1891 census in Tottenham with her children  John (Bruce’s grandfather) and Christina, who wrote the diary Bruce received in the programme. John was working as a warehouse porter and Christina as a kitchen maid. Joseph Forsyth Johnson was not with the family again - as Bruce discovered, he had hot-footed it over to the USA with a younger woman and was enjoying considerable success and prosperity as a landscape gardener.

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We’re looking forward to the rest of the series!

Following the launch of our fully indexed birth records last week, we’ve uncovered some interesting finds within the records:

• 10 babies named Fish Fish were born between 1840 and 1883, bizarrely, all in Lancashire. The list even includes one Fish Fish Fish born in Blackburn in 1864:

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• 340 Adolfs have been registered - with the last birth listed in the UK in 2005.
• Just five Ringos were registered in 1964 and 1965, compared with 2,414 Georges, 36,877 Johns and 56,170 Pauls.
• Six Dick Turpins were registered between 1854 and 1916 - a highwayman from the 1700s:

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• Four Maradonas were registered in 1986, the year of the infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal. Eight more were registered between 1999 and 2006, including two Diego Maradonas and two Ronaldo Maradonas.
• Eight Peles were registered between 1970 and 1972, following the footballer’s 1000th goal in 1969.
• Eight babies have been given the forename Hercules, with a further 51 bearing it as a middle name.

We also did some research into the birth patterns over the past century and found that the trend for births at certain times of the year has changed. In 1907 and 1908, the peak time of year for births was in quarter two during April, May and June, compared with 2007 and 2008 when July, August and September saw the most births. It’s possible that 21st century parents are more mindful of the school year than they were 100 years ago.

Search our fully indexed birth records today to see who you can find.

Don’t miss the start of a brand new series of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC1 at 9pm tomorrow (Monday 19 July). The first celebrity to have his tree researched by the programme’s experts is Bruce Forsyth. The research centres around Bruce’s great-grandfather, a prominent 19th century landscape gardener, who may have been a bigamist. Watch the programme to find out more.

We’ve been busy this week adding over 40,000 new parish baptism and burial records to findmypast.co.uk

New City of London Burial Index records

We’ve just added 30,596 records for the Spa Fields Burial Ground from the City of London Burial Index to findmypast.co.uk

These records cover the period from March 1778 to March 1810 and takes findmypast.co.uk’s coverage of this site from 1778 up to 1849.

Search these records in our parish burial records collection.

More information about the City of London Burial Index can be found in our knowledge base.

New London docklands parish baptism records

Also this week, we’ve added 10,625 new London docklands parish baptism records to the site. The details of these records are as follows:

St Mary Stratford – 1771-1813 – 1,966 baptisms
St Mary Stratford – 1813-1831 – 1,534 baptisms
St John Wapping – 1707-1734 – 7,125 baptisms

Search our parish baptisms for your London docklands ancestors.

These records were provided by Docklands Ancestors. You can read more about the London docklands records in our knowledge base.

We’re very happy to announce that you can now search fully indexed birth records for 1837 to 2006 on findmypast.co.uk

Fully indexing the birth records involved rescanning 170 years of records and transcribing the quarter of a billion names within them. Over 1,000 people have worked on this two-year project.

These records are now the easiest to search complete birth records available anywhere online. The following are some of the benefits of the fully indexed birth records:

• Your search results will be in the form of a list of individual names, so you won’t have to check through pages of records to find your ancestors
• There is a complete 1837-2006 set of records
• The images of the index pages are completely new and very high quality
• We’ve added smart search features including name variants, and highlighting of unnamed children (very common in the Victorian period)
• There are clever search results to get around the quirks of the records, including the GRO’s procedure of initialising second names
• You can now search by mother’s and father’s name at the same time to help find those elusive births

If you haven’t had success finding an ancestor’s birth record previously, it’s definitely worth trying again using our fully indexed birth records - start searching them now.

Next on the list is a project to fully index the marriage and death records which we expect to complete by the end of the year.

Read all about it - the lovely people at Discover my Past now have a facebook page!

‘Like’ them to hear when the latest issues of their magazines are out and to get sneaky previews of what will be featured.

Discover my Past on facebook

Thanks to all of you who entered our World Cup competition. As the tournament is over, it’s time to let you know the correct answers to the questions and reveal our winner!

Question 1: What was the recorded occupation of William Matt, aged 36, living in Easthampstead, Berkshire in the 1911 census?

Answer: Snob! Lots of you correctly added that a snob was a bootmaker and repairer at the upper end of the trade.

Question 2: How many first names was Ann Pepper, born in West Derby in the Jan/Feb/Mar quarter of 1883, given?

Answer: A whopping 25 first names! Ann was given a first name for every letter of the alphabet except P: Ann, Bertha, Cecilia, Diana, Emily, Fanny, Gertrude, Hypatia, Inez, Jane, Kate, Louisa, Maud, Nora, Ophelia, Quince, Rebecca, Starkey, Teresa, Ulysis, Venus, Winifred, Xenophen, Yetty and Zeus. The mind boggles!

Question 3: Can you tell us what disability Chelsea Pensioner Bartholomew Murphy, born in Wexford in 1841, who served in the 36th Reg Of Foot, is reported to have?

Answer: Malformation of feet and overlapping toes. Poor chap!

Question 4: Which ship was Joseph Dugemin a passenger on?

Answer: The Titanic.

Our lucky winner is Rosemary Rowley from Macclesfield, Cheshire who wins a digital camera, vouchers for a year’s Full subscription to findmypast.co.uk, ‘Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors’ a book by Anthony Burton, a family history starter pack, a 1911census.co.uk mouse mat and the all-important findmypast.co.uk pencil!

Congratulations Rosemary and thanks to all of you who entered. We hope we provided you with some amusement during the World Cup.