Hey, I got bastards in my family...

My eldest sister, a retired academic librarian, is researching our family tree and just back from the village in England where our English ancestors came from. While researching some church documents in Suffolk, she came across this;


On 9th July 1805 an order was made concerning a male bastard child born in the parish of Lavenham of the body of Mary Curtis. On oath Mary Curtis said that on 20th May she was delivered of a male bastard child an that William Ambrose Jnr, Labourer of Lavenham did beget the said bastard child. William Ambrose Jnr didn't give the justices of the peace; who made the order; any cause why he should not be judged the reputed father and was ordered to pay forty shillings for and towards the laying in of Mary Curtis and two shillings a week for the keeping, sustentation and maintenance of the child whilst it was chargeable to the parish. Both these amounts were to be paid to the churchwardens and overseers of the poor of the parish of Lavenham.

I hate to think what she's gonna find when she does our Scottish side.

 

You're related to Fenian?

 

I don't need to fill out a family tree to know I come from a long line of white trash. I've got cousins with three or four kids each with as many different 'fathers' ... one of them was pregnant the same time as her mom ...

 

He's a Paddy for God's sake.

 

Can't compete with that

 

I'm pretty sure I'm the only bastard in my family. Catholic mom and grandparents + one-story home = me.

 

No bastard (to my knowledge), but there are murderers and one of the English landowners partially responsible for the Irish potato famine in my family.

 

FB will hunt you down.

 

I also have people who fled the potato famine among my ancestors. I'm sad the murderer wasn't one of the Irish guys taking out a landowner. Instead he was some landowner's son who's daddy sent him over here to escape the law. sigh.

My half-siblings, however, are related to Keiser Wilhelm's bastard daughter, who was hideous. We have pictures.

 

My grandfather was raised as his mother's brother. That's just how it was done back there, back then. My father also recalled one summer, when he was a young child, one of his sisters putting on a great deal of weight. He heard a baby crying in the night but there was no baby in the house the next day. The 'baby' showed up on our doorstep 40-some years later, looking for her mother, who had since passed.

Those aren't the only ones. I have cousins and second cousins who are ... my eldest niece was even born a bastard child, although her parents later married.

Damn Easterners.

 

Any relation?

 

I believe we have the Sentence Of The Year.