General Chat

Does anyone think that the decline in marriages would effect future generations trying to search family history??

I was thinking about this the other day and that the decline in marriages means that there won't be as many marriage certificates around for future genealogist to get info from and make it harder.

I know its a silly question but I do occasionally get thoughts popping into my head!!!!!

Kerin xx

Totally agree with this.

Then again future generations just may not care enough to try and find their ancestors.

Also the amount of births without a father will be very hard to trace, so maybe they will just follow the female lines.

Gail

This got me thinking . - Re No named Father etc. -about all the medical advances, egg & sperm donors etc. (not to mention surrogacy) .
Fine if a future researcher wants to know how & where their parents lived etc. But tracing true Genealogy will be virtually impossible. Genes? Genealogy - Will it be called that in the 22nd century ?
Like you Kerin, things just pop into my head too.

One other thing struck me that could make things difficult - this is a different slant on the unmarried parents one. What happens if Miss Bloggs marries Mr. Jones and has a child (who would be named Jones with mother's maiden name Bloggs on the index) but then Mr. and Mrs. Jones separate.

Mrs. Jones then starts a relationship with Mr. Smith and had a child with him - those children are going to come up as Smith with mother's name Bloggs on the births index - but Mrs. Jones and Mr. Smith never actually marry.

I imagine people would end up looking for a second marriage that doesn't exist - and that's not even accounting for people who go abroad to marry. My neighbour's child lives about fifty miles from here but he and his wife married in Mauritius!

Unless we do the hard graft NOW future generations have no chance x

The sceniario that Kate mentions has already cropped up more than once among my lot. The ones born wrong side of the blanket are the hardest.

My maternal grandmother didn't bother with a husband, nor my Mother. On one of Hubby's twigs a couple never wed despite having a large brood, first child with her maiden name, the rest his.

Also it would be helpful if both parents were named on marriage certs, they wouldn't have to be much bigger.

I agree, future research will be well nigh impossible.

Unless official records are improved they will be next to useless, the most reliable information will actually be dependent on us, the amateur genealogists !

I'm glad Paula that it isnt just me that has these thoughts popping into my head.

On the subject of tracing the maternal line, I have always thought that the maternal line is only line where true parentage can be traced truthfully traced as apart from the ones in the 50s and 60s where mothers pretended to be the mother of their daughers child to spare the shame you can't really fake who gave birth to a child.

Although with the uptake of surragacy and as mentioned before sperm/egg donor do we need to re assess what we class as genetics