I am so surprised at how many of my Swedish ancestors were born out of wedlock during the 1800’s. You would expect it to happen once in a while – and I had assumed that it must have been a shameful thing during that time period. I am starting to think that it might not have been so bad though, because it wasn’t just my ancestors that were having babies without being married. As I have been searching through the birth records, I’ve seen a surprising number of children whose parents weren’t married.
Here are some examples from various years of Swedish birth records of how the children born out of wedlock were marked on the birth registers:
The father often wasn’t named on the records, which is unfortunate.
Here is one instance from my own family tree, when the child was born out of wedlock, but then it was crossed out since the couple got married. 🙂 Pig. stood for an unmarried female. The date given on the second line is when Carin married Per, one month after the baby was born.
