There are many pitfalls in climbing the family tree, but there are usually certain things you can count on. For example, it is fairly reasonable to assume that a child will have its father's surname. If a woman was named Joan Whittier, you naturally assume her father was also named Whittier. We are used to struggling to discover the mother's maiden name, but we feel pretty confident of the father's surname. Be prepared, however, because, at some point in your family history research, you are likely to encounter an illegitimate child and that is when all of the rules will change.

In researching this subject, I found that most of the information on Web sites and in genealogy books pertained to Britain and America. Illegitimacy existed, of course, in other countries and, so far as I could discover, the attitudes and ways of recording it were much the same...

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