Question

how best to enter illegitimate children and parents

Comments

Sorry, as i'm new at this I didn't realise that my question was posted because I went and looked at the other questions about illegitimacy, my problem is that in many cases I do know the fathers name but that is all I know and  Wikitree seems to want dates as well which I can't provide so how do I give a father to my very many illegitimate ancestors!!

Answer 1

When we don't have a solid date for a person, we can enter an informed guess -- guess at the father's birth date, based on the birth date of the child -- and add {{Estimated Date}} at the top of the biography section to indicate the uncertainty in the date.

Comments

Not much help really as I have one who had six illegitimate children to six different fathers from 1881 to 1903 and another who had four to different fathers from 1886 to 1891. I suppose the most you could say that the fathers must have been alive at the time of conception about nine months prior to birth. Since I also have a married couple having a first child when he was 73 and she was 30 and another couple where she was 21 and he was 66, perhaps you can see my difficulty in estimating dates of birth.

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Well, if you enter a date guess based on the assumption that he was 22 -- or 40 -- at the birth of the child, the date is likely to be within 50 years of the real value. That's a lot more informative than leaving the date field empty.