Family formation, marriage and procreative careers in late nineteenth century
Scotland.
Alice Reid & Eilidh Garrett
Paper to be presented at:
Population, economy, and welfare, 1200-2000
16-18 September 2011, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Slide 1
The relationships between marriage, household formation, extra marital and marital
fertility have been a recurring theme in Richard Smith's work. Within the European
Marriage Pattern characterised by the importance of economic independence for
newly-wed couples in general, and medieval English society in particular, he has
emphasised marriage as a life-course process rather than an event, and entry to
headship as the key event affecting fertility: adjustment for pre-marital fertility
suggests a natural fertility regime. Changes in source material from court documents
to registrations of events have created a spurious impression of increasing adherence
to the solemnisation of marriage as the start of the union, but the implications of this
for later periods when unions are measured exclusively by official registrations of
marriage have rarely been explored. In particular the implications for measures of
nuptiality, fertility and household formation over the demographic transition have
been neglected.
This paper will use registrations of marriage and birth, and living arrangements as
measured by the census in late nineteenth century Scotland to examine procreative
careers in a number of different ways, within three different socio-economic settings.
We will focus on the timing of marriage within women’s procreative histories and
consider measurements of family building from a variety of perspectives.
Slide 2
The data
Civil registers of births, marriages and deaths 1861-1901
Census enumerators books 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901.
Linked the two sets of records
The three study communities
Kilmarnock (urban, lowland, mixed industrial economy, expanding)
Skye (rural, highland, island, crofting, self-sufficiency, fishing, out-migration)
Rothiemay (rural, North-East, agricultural wage-labour, high illegitimacy,
high population circulation)
Slide 3
The basic demography: comparisons of measures fertility for the three communities
Having both census and civil registers allows us to calculate both illegitimacy ratios
and illegitimacy rates:
Rothiemay has very high illegitimacy ratios. Skye and Kilmarnock have more
moderate illegitimacy ratios, which are fairly similar to each other
However the illegitimacy rates show that illegitimacy per unmarried (or
widowed) woman on Skye is much lower than in Kilmarnock. The rates for
Rothiemay remain much higher than either of the other communities.
Kilmarnock’s illegitimacy rates show a marked decline over the second half of
the nineteenth century, in contrast to the rates in the rural communities.
For comparison, the legitimate birth rates are shown, all three communities
having roughly similar levels in the mid-nineteenth century, but Kilmarnock’s
rates decline in the last two decades.
We want to consider whether legitimate and illegitimate children were produced by
two distinct groups of women, or whether women’s procreative histories involved
both types of birth.
Slide 4
We have three sources of data on marriage:
Marriage certificates
Birth certificates (giving the date and place of parents’ marriage)
The census (giving marital status)
This slide shows a nineteenth century marriage certificate for Skye showing the
wealth of information provided by the certificates.
Slide 5
In the absence of certificates giving the ages of brides and grooms, most researchers
of the 19th century rely on census records to calculate the Singulate Mean Age at
Marriage (SMAM) as an indicator of average age at marriage. Researchers are seldom
lucky enough to have registers available with which to compare the SMAM estimates.
SMAMs rely on census reports of the number of women remaining unmarried at time
of census in each five year age group from 15-19 years to 50-54 years.1 Assumptions
have to be made however that the different age groups do not experience different
migration rates, and that when comparing different populations the populations are
not experiencing different levels of migration. Kilmarnock was a growing town, with
considerable net in-migration, whereas Skye was experiencing marked out-migration.
Rothiemay, it has been noted elsewhere (Reid et al. 2006), saw considerable circular
migration, with many young unmarried women returning home from elsewhere to
1
We calculated the SMAMs for 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901 using the census returns and the
method outlined in Shryock and Seagal (p167) [which appears to include an error in the calculations
shown, although the text directions correspond to those given in the UNPD/Desa website:
www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WMD2008/Metadata/SMAM.html.
bear their children, many of the latter staying in the community, with or without their
mothers.
We can see that the SMAM calculations do not accurately reflect ages of first
marriage in any of these communities. For Kilmarnock and particularly for Skye, the
SMAMs overestimate the average ages of first marriage for women, and for
Rothiemay the two series look quite different, although the pattern of differences is
less consistent. We suspect these discrepancies are due to differential migration by
age and marital status in the three communities, but further research is needed to
confirm this. It is possibly a warning to those using SMAMs to avoid over-reliance on
the story they tell.
Slide 6
While birth and death are demographic events ‘pure and simple’, marriage is a much
more fluid concept. The Dictionary of Demography 1985 (p136) defines it as:
‘The legal union of persons of the opposite sex, the legality being established
by civil, religious or other means according to the custom and law of each
country’.
Demographers most often take marriage to signify both the start of cohabitation and
of exposure to sexual intercourse and therefore the risk of having children Thus the
legal contract of marriage is assumed to be the start of the women’s procreative
careers because, although some women’s childbearing starts well before marriage,
carries on after the end of a marriage, or even takes place in the complete absence of
any formal union at all, it is very difficult to measure the start of exposure to
childbearing by any other means. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
have seen a rise in cohabitation as a prelude or alternative to marriage, particularly
since the ‘golden age’ of marriage in the 1950s and 60s (Kiernan 2004). Much has
been written about marriage in England and Wales and marriage as a demographic
phenomenon before 1837, but less detailed research has been undertaken on the civil
register era (see Laslett 1980, Gillis 1985), and less on Scotland (although see Flinn et
al, Blaikie, Boyd). Most research has suggested that although there were subsections
of society throughout Britain engaging in stable cohabiting unions before the midnineteenth century, the advent of civil registration provided an alternative to church
marriage for those who could not or would not participate: in particular those who
were unable to dissolve a previous failed union and those objecting to a religious
ceremony (Gillis 1985).
Marriage law had been complicated throughout the British Isles before the mid
eighteenth century, with different legal status and behaviours attributed to betrothal
and marriage. In England and Wales in 1754, with the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s
Marriage Act the law ‘stamped a uniform and inflexible definition of marriage’
(Parker 1990, p.47) making only marriage after the publication of the banns and
before a Church of England Minister legal. It is argued that continuance of less strict,
but now illegal, marriage practices after 1754 contributed to a growth in un-lawful
unions and illegitimacy (Parker 1990, p.63).
Hardwicke’s Act applied did not apply to Scotland, (Boyd 1980, 51-3) and after it
came into force many English couples resorted to marriage north of the border, where
the laws surrounding marriage had long been rather different. Formal, ‘regular’
marriage in Scotland was similar to that in England and Wales: having to take place
after the requisite reading of the banns and before a minister of the Church of
Scotland or an Episcopalian minister, although not necessarily in a church (Boyd
1980, 51). However, Scottish law also recognised that a simple exchange of consent,
preferably in front of at least one witness, could constitute a perfectly legal, but
‘irregular’ marriage and parental consent if either party proposed to marry before the
age of 21 was not required. It is worth considering the different legal position of
marriage in the two countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Civil registration, which arrived in 1837 in England and Wales, made the
measurement of marriage much easier in many ways, as the recording of all marriages
was gathered together in one place and is assumed to have fairly universal coverage.
The lack of systematic access to the individual registers for England and Wales has,
however, prevented detailed study on the processes of marriage as experienced by
individuals, and there is no overwhelming consensus on the degree to which marriage
can be assumed to mark the start of a childbearing union in the nineteenth century.
With the introduction of the possibility of marriage in non-conformist places of
worship or in registry offices, it is argued that ‘an age of conformity’ began which
only started to break down with a growth in cohabitation in the later twentieth century
(Parker 1990, p.74). It was assumed that civil weddings took over where informal
practices had previously reigned (Gillis 1983). Not only did civil marriage make nonconformist marriage possible and increased the privacy of the marriage ceremony, but
other changes such as the Married Women’s Property Acts of the 1870s and 1880s
and laws which guaranteed the mother’s right to her children minimised the
disadvantages of formal marriages for women (Gillis 1983, p. 285). In contrast, others
argue that ‘given the strong control over pre-betrothal sexual union, it does not seem
likely that many north-western Europeans in [the nineteenth century] flouted
community and familial standards by living together without having exchanged
marriage vows’ (Thornton et al, p.43). Parker suggests that unmarried cohabitation
was common in nineteenth century cities, but that childbearing was restricted for the
most part to marriage (1990 p.75)
Civil registration did not begin in Scotland until 1855. Before 1836 in Scotland
regular marriage could only be performed after banns and before a Minister of the
Church of Scotland (or, from the Act of Toleration in 1711, a Episcopalian church)
and it thought that ‘irregular’ marriage was common. Such marriages were
encouraged by the growth in non-conformism, and may have constituted around a
third of all marriages in the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century
(the evidence of Dr Stark to the Royal Commission 1868, p.xxi). However in 1836 a
change of in the law meant that ministers of any religious denomination could
perform ‘regular’ marriages and mid-nineteenth century observers argued that over
time this had led to a growth in public feeling against irregular marriage, which
increasingly had stigma attached to it. (Royal Commission 1868, p.xxii; Smout, 1981,
p.204). Certainly a number of important observers were adamant that no respectable
people would contemplate such a union. Certainly a significant number of irregular
marriages in Scotland were contracted by English nationals, particularly in the border
counties including the infamous Gretna Green, but the passing of a further law, Lord
Brougham’s Act of 1856, effectively put an end to this with a 21 day a residence
requirement (Smout 1981, p.210).
Irregular marriage could be valid with even one witness and no written record, and
consent could even be presumed under circumstances such as the act of sexual
intercourse together with a prior promise of marriage in writing or a subsequent oath
testifying to such a promise (Smout 1981, pp 206-7, Select Committee 1849, p.8;
Royal Commission 1868, p.xix). There was also a public assumption of irregular
marriages ‘by habit and repute’ according to which a couple could be shown to have
treated each other as married over a number of years (Smout 1981, p.207, Select
Committee 1849, p.10), but the Royal Commission on the Laws of Marriage points
out this might be evidence of marriage but does not constitute marriage however
much the general public might think so (Royal Commission 1868, p.xx).
Irregular marriages in Scotland are very difficult to measure before the advent of civil
registration, and this situation does not much improve thereafter. Some sources such
as the Scotland’s People website,
(http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/content/help/index.aspx?r=554&403 accessed
5/8/2011) maintain that from 1855 the registration of marriage became compulsory,
but Smout claims that even after 1856, there was no legal obligation to register a
marriage, although he suggests that most were registered (Smout 1981, p. 205). The
presence of a registrar was not required even at a regular marriage (although his
attendance could be obtained for a payment of 20s) (Royal Commission 1868, p.
xviii). It was the duty of the husband or wife to return a completed form, which they
were sent when they published the banns, and which then became the basis of the
registration (Royal Commission 1868, p.92). Or, as Sinclair puts it:
‘Before the marriage, the contracting parties had to obtain a schedule
which was completed ny the clergyman at the time of the marriage and
then broght to the registrar for registration of the marriage.’ (Sinclair, p.
47).
An irregular marriage could find its way into the civil registers by one of three means:
as the result of a prosecution for clandestine marriage, by declaration of the exchange
of consent to a magistrate or Sheriff within three months of the marriage, who would
then provide a warrant which could be taken to the local registrar and enable him to
register the marriage legally, or by declaration before the Registrar himself.2 It is
generally assumed (particularly by contemporaries) that all regular marriages and the
vast majority of irregular marriages were registered, even though the report of the
Royal Commission produced evidence of caution on both counts. In the case of
regular marriages, testimony from Mr Seton (an experienced assistant registrar)
described regular forgetting of the schedule (particularly by the poorer classes) and
described a system fractured between parish and registrars where follow up was hard
and there was a clear possibility of a regular marriage taking place without being
registered (Royal Commission 1868, p. 94-5).3 In the case of irregular marriage the
report expressed very healthy scepticism: ‘it is … quite impossible to rely upon the
General Registry as furnishing any data, upon which even a loose estimate of the total
2
Smout (1981, p.206, quoting M’Connochie) claims that only a Sheriff’s warrant could make an
irregular marriage legal and that the majority of irregular marriages were by Sheriff’s warrant.
However the Royal Commission makes it clear that a declaration could be made to the Registrar
himself, an assertion which complies with the wording on the marriage register.
3
Cf Smout (1981, p. 221): ‘we need not doubt that all regular marriages … were registered’. In 1878 a
further Act allowed publication of a notice in the registry office to replace banns which would have
increased ease of follow up for at least some couples (Smout 1981, p. 223).
number of irregular marriage actually contracted can be found’. Nevertheless the
Commissioners were quite happy to accept the views of the majority, based on such
data, that the number and proportion of irregular marriages was very small (p. xxii).
The evidence from the early detailed reports of the Registrar General for Scotland
certainly shows that only a handful of irregular marriages took place, and the
assumption is that irregular marriage before 1836 had been a function of nonconformity, and once regular marriages according to non-conformist rites were
allowed the need for irregular marriage dissolved. However there is reason to treat the
figures on which this assumption is based with considerable scepticism. In the
Registrar General’s detailed report for 1867, W Pitt Dundas argued argued that a
massive drop in the number of irregular marriages between 1850-1852 and 1857 was
due to the beneficial effect of Broughams Act in preventing the disreputable practice
of English contracting clandestine marriage in Scotland. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ data
come from very different sources, however, and are somewhat belied by before and
after data for the whole of Scotland from his own reports, which state that although
there were only thirty-six irregular marriages in 1856, there were only nine in 1855
(RG 1862, p.xviii).4 It would be unlikely that Brougham’s Act had an antecedent
effect, and more likely that civil registration captured only a minority of irregular
marriages.
Rare surviving registers of South Leith, where the parish garnered lists of irregular
marriage so they could use the fines, suggest that such marriage was very common in
this area, and also that a number of the couples indicated the presence both an
irrespectable and irreligious sub-culture and a great many respectable people among
its participants (Smout 1981, p. 220).
The registration of irregular marriage by conviction or by a decree of declarator
required payment of 20s, but registration on the application of both parties within
three months cost 5s only (Royal Commission 1868, p. xxiii).
Nevertheless, registered irregular marriage did increase over the course of the
nineteenth century, Smout shows that irregular marriage witnessed a long slow
increase from 1870 to 1910, but it is difficult to tell whether this reflects a real rise, or
an increase in the proportion of those contracting such marriage who registered it.
This raises one question about the number and proportion of irregular marriage in
Scotland. A further question relates to the frequency of ambiguous relations. Some
witnesses before the Royal Commission maintained that there were a large number of
people who could not tell whether they were married or not married (Royal
Commission 1868, p.xxii).
There thus arises a very real possibility, recognised by the Registrar General of
England and Wales but hotly contested by the Registrar General for Scotland in a
series of comments in the respective Annual Reports of the 1870s, that marriage was
underregistered in Scotland, with the children of irregular marriages were recorded as
legitimate producing spuriously high marital fertility (Registrar General for England
and Wales 1879, p. vi). The Registrar General of Scotland asserted that on the
4
The figure of 36 irregular marriages registered in Scotland in 1856 should be set against the testimony
of the registrar for Eyemouth who reported that 20 to 30 local couples were irregularly married ‘at the
Toll’, although he did report that such events were a rarity seven years later (Smout 1868, p.222).
contrary hardly ever did either regular or irregular marriage escape registration, and
preferred to attribute lower nuptiality and higher fertility in Scotland to higher poverty
and sparser population density (Registrar General for Scotland 1880, p.xx-xxii).
Smout recognises that the increase in irregular marriage as recorded by the civil
registers is hard to explain. He suggests secularization, and a ‘new quest for privacy
and economy’ which might have led to a switch from regular to irregular marriage.
Alternatively, irregular marriage became more attractive as an alternative to a long
term unmarried alliance. Smout suggests that increasing penalties associated with
illegitimacy (connected to a growth in education and changes in the poor law and
rights to relief) might have contributed to a growth in the importance of marriage
itself as the proper place for child-bearing (Smout 1981, pp. 225-7). Neither of these
is wholly convincing: secularization had been occurring long before the 1870s when
the rise appears to begin, and it is difficult to pin down the changes in the poor law
and welfare state to this time either.
It might be worth revisiting the conclusion that all marriages, regular or irregular,
were civilly registered. The evidence for this seems to be based on the assertion of the
registrar general, but it is possible that the increase was a reflection of an increase in
the likelihood of registration of a small and relatively stable percentage of marriages
which were always occurring in this way. Were people swearing before Sheriff or
making a declaration in front of some other person, but not taking the warrant or other
declaration to the Registrar?
Scottish civil marriage registers were required to have the details of the marriage
recorded, including the signatures of officiating minister and witnesses, and religious
denomination if it was a regular marriage. If it was irregular, the date of conviction,
decree of declarator or Sheriff’s warrant was required.
Slide 7
Numbers and percentages of irregular marriages for various categories of place are
given in the detailed annual reports of the Registrar General of Scotland, and some are
reproduced in Smout (1981, pp, 222-3). When the Kilmarnock, Skye and Rothiemay
databases were created, the denomination of the marriage was recorded, or if it was
‘by declaration’, enabling comparisons in irregular marriage with national figures.
This slide shows the increase in irregular marriage for all of Scotland, and for
Kilmarnock and Skye. The detailed annual reports for the Registrar General of
Scotland show that there was a substantial urban rural gradient in irregular marriage,
with principal burghs having the highest rates (2 per cent in 1874, 5 per cent in 1884,
8 per cent in 1894 and 10 per cent in 1904), large towns had rates which increased
from 0.16 per cent in 1874 to just under 2 per cent in 1904, small towns increased
from 01 to .45 per cent, and irregular marriage in rural areas was lower still. Until
1880 there were only 8 ‘Principal Towns’ listed in the Registrar General’s Annual
reports, but in 1881 Kilmarnock was added to this category as a ninth. Therefore its
reported rates of irregular marriage, being lower than the principal burghs en masse,
but higher than the large towns, is not surprising. Skye has so few marriages by
declaration recorded that perhaps it would be unwise to put much store by the
apparent trends in the percentages.
It is still, perhaps, surprising that so few irregular marriages are recorded. We wanted
to investigate further what sort of irregular marriage those occurring in Kilmarnock
were, and it is clear that there were specific addresses or streets where such events
were concentrated. The second table on this slide shows these streets. Unfortunately
they were in general not residential addresses which would have enabled us to
investigate them via the census, but one is clearly the Registrar’s Office and another
the Sheriff’s Court House.
Nevertheless, levels and trends in irregular marriage in Kilmarnock therefore fit in
with national trends. With recourse to more than just marriage certificates, it should
be possible to investigate the degree of ‘hidden irregular’ marriage.
Slide 8
The second source of information on marriage is the birth certificate, which gives the
date and place of parents’ marriage, in addition to parents’ names (including mother’s
maiden surname) and occupations. Where no marriage details are included and the
certificate does not explicitly record that the child is illegitimate, we assume the child
was born out of wedlock, even if both parents’ names are recorded. On some
certificates only the mother’s name appears and these too are taken to be illegitimate,
in the absence of an explicit statement.
Slide 9
Using Rothimay as an example, the civil registers of marriage and birth, we can first
consider the composition of births in the parish, 1861-1901.
c. 78% of birth were legitimate
22 % were illegitimate, a third of which were registered by both parents
When births are assigned to individual mothers 769 distinct ‘procreative units’ can be
identified.
Of these, 488 (63%) are observed to have only legitimate children (they may
have had illegitimate children outside our study period or in a different place).
252 (33%) have only illegitimate children and only 29 (4%) have both
illegitimate and legitimate children.
Three women have illegitimate children registered by mother only, by both
mother and father, and also legitimate children.
The procreative units suggest that 37 % of women had sex outside marriage.
When we look more closely at the ‘legitimate birth only’ families, we discover
that 87 of the women were pregnant on marriage. So in this community 48%
of women demonstrably began their procreative careers before marriage.
Slide 10
We had hoped to replicate the above exercise for the other two communities, but
encountered some difficulties. The very small name pool on Skye thwarted efforts to
identify procreative units because there were too many single women of the same age
with the same name, even within small townships. In urban Kilmarnock unmarried
women and their families were not always easy to identify as is shown by the case of
Elizabeth Lang in this slide.
Elizabeth bore thirteen children between 1866 and 1887: all the children were
illegitimate with no father listed on the birth certificates. However in the 1871 and
1881 censuses, they are all recorded as the children of John Stevenson (1881 is shown
on the slide), a roadsman in a colliery. In the census, the children’s relationship to
their mother cannot be identified, but she is present in the household listed as a
servant. It is possible that John and Elizabeth could not marry as he was married to
(although clearly estranged from) someone else. In 1901 the two children remaining
at home are listed with the surname Lang but their mother is not present in the
household (there is no record in the Kilmarnock registers of her death).
Slide 11
We then attempted to trace those couples who bore children in Kilmarnock before
1901 who stated on their children’s birth certificate that they had been married in
Kilmarnock around the census.
The percentage of marriages reported on birth certificates to have occurred in
Kilmarnock between 1861 and 1901 which cannot be found in the civil registers can
be taken as a measure of unrecorded irregular marriage. This exercise must proceed
with extreme caution, however. Nominal record linkage is a time consuming task,
even when the majority of it is performed using computer algorithms. Such automated
techniques are likely to miss some links due to misrecording in parents’ names or
dates, so couples who report a marriage which cannot be found might be the simply
missed links and need to be checked very carefully. The even more time consuming
of this checking means that marriages supposed to have occurred in only a selection
of years were checked.5
This slide gives the results from this exercise, comparing registration among couples
bearing children who were registered between 1861 and 1891, where the birth
certificates stated that parents had been married in Kilmarnock. It shows that there
was a decline in ‘unregistered irregular’ marriages until the early 1880s, then a slight
recovery.6 Broadly speaking, then, the pattern is complementary to the trend in
registered irregular marriage, supporting the possibility that the rise in irregular
marriage over last few decades of the nineteenth century was a result of increasing
registration of such unions. There is also the possibility that those not wanting or
knowing to register their marriage may not have wanted or known about the need to
register the births of their children, and that births and deaths to such people may also
be missed.
Slide 12
The table in the previous slide assumes that those exchanging vows in an irregular
contract viewed that exchange of vows as official enough to be entered into the birth
5
Many missed links were found, particularly including some wilder variations in the spelling or mistranscription of names which had not reached the name dictionary, or other reasons such as one of the
marriage partners going by their father’s surname in one source and by their mother’s surname in the
other. For publication, this exercise will be expanded to cover the entire 40 year period.
6
The figures for 1861-2 may be a slight overestimation, as the date of marriage given was not always
completely accurate and marriages supposed to have taken in 1861 may have in fact taken place in
1860 which cannot be checked as our data only starts in 1861.
register. It is possible that some registrars instructed those registering a birth only to
write down the details of those marriages which had been civilly registered. There
may be other couples bearing children but not recording details of marriage on the
birth certificate who considered themselves to be married. It is possible to detect some
of these by looking at how they recorded themselves in the census.
Table 3 shows that as a percentage of all women claiming to be married in the census
who can be identified as the mother of a registered birth, the number who claim to be
married in the census but recorded no marriage information at the birth of any her
children is extremely small: less than one per cent at every census.
Inspection of these individuals shows that in many cases there was a reason why they
could not have married although they may well have wanted the respectability of that
institution. The difficulty of divorce means that some couples passing themselves off
as married in the census could not have married as one party was still married to
someone else. For example Catherine Hodge and James Angus had six children
between 1862 and 1873. Those registered by James have his name on the birth
certificate as well as Catherine’s, but those registered by Catherine have no mention
of James. All the children yet born bear James’ surname in the 1871 census although
Catherine is reported as ‘Angus or McClay’ suggesting she is married to another.
In other circumstances it is less clear why no actual marriage had taken place. For
example, Ellen Liddle and Gilbert Littlejohn appeared in the 1871 census as a typical
married couple with four children aged between one and seven, in 1881 they had six
co-resident children. In fact they had eight children all between 1863 and 1879, all
registered as illegitimate, and all but the first attributed to Gilbert on the birth
certificate. Later in 1881 Ellen died of peritonitis, and Gilbert registers her death,
reporting his relationship to her as ‘friend’. What reason could be for them not to have
married? A clue to this is given by the 1861 census where a George Littlejohn of the
right age, occupation (Cartwright), and birthplace (Galston) is recorded as married to
Marion Littlejohn: Marion died in 1863 of consumption a few months before Ellen’s
first illegitimate daughter was born. It is likely that George was the father as the
Marion’s address at her death and Ellen’s at the birth of her daughter were identical.
George and Ellen could have married. In fact Geoge does marry after Ellen’s death,
this time to another Marion (Marion Kempsill) who brings with her her own
illegitimate daughter. At the birth the difficulty of divorce in the nineteenth century
Although some such unions were of long-standing, others seem to have collapsed.
Martha Hamilton and Alexander Ewart bear three illegitimate children together and in
1871 they report themselves to be man and wife in the census, where they live with
their eldest child. It is likely that they had not married because Alexander was married
to someone else in 1861 who does not appear to have died. By 1881, however, we can
only find their two eldest children in the census: they are resident in the Industrial
Reformatory suggesting that calamity had struck the family.
Slide 13
Nevertheless, there was clearly a lot of premarital conception and childbirth. Today
when couples give the same address at marriage it is taken as an indication of
cohabitation before marriage. How much this is also true of nineteenth century
Kilmarnock is unclear, but the percentages of marriages with precise street addresses
(house number or name and street) which have exactly the same address given for
both bride and groom would suggest a relatively high degree of premarital
cohabitation, even if only for a short time. There were 8653 marriages in Kilmarnock
between 1861 and 1901, and in almost exactly half of them (5308) both bride and
groom gave precise street addresses, ie including not only town and street (not
necessarily in Kilmarnock), but also a number or name of house. Table 4 shows the
percentages of these where the addresses given by bride and groom were exactly the
same.7 Overall 12 per cent of couples appear to have lived together before marriage,
at least for a short time. This appears to have dwindled considerably over the fortyyear period, but the figures for the 1860s should be treated with extreme caution due
to the very small number of people who provided precise street addresses.
It would be prudent to treat these figures with extreme caution as it might have been
fashionable or relatively common practice to report the address where the newly
marrying couple were going to set up home rather than the addresses they were
marrying from.
However, differences by marital status of bride and groom suggest that at least some
of these apparent cohabitations were real. Marriages where the bride had been
previously married were much more likely to have been preceded by cohabitation:
inspection of some of the census records preceding the marriage show such brides
often living as a female head of household containing her children, with her
prospective husband listed as a boarder. For example this arrangement is clear in the
1881 census household of Elizabeth Stewart and her boarder and future husband,
Thomas McFarlane. Whether they were already sharing a bed is an interesting
question.
Other scenarios also present themselves and it is clear that although pre-marital
cohabitation between bachelors and spinsters was a reasonably common occurrence,
this is difficult to identify from the census as they were likely either to describe
themselves as head and boarder (for example two months before their marriage in
1881 Thomas Holmes was a boarder in the household of Janet Stevenson and her
illegitimate 10-month old infant. No father is recorded for the infant, so we cannot tell
if he was Thomas’ child). Sometimes both bride and groom were living in the house
of one of their parents: for example Margaret McCaw and her sister were boarding
with the family of James Kirkland two months before Margaret married James. It is
probably unlikely that the couple were sharing a bed when they lived with his parents,
but at the point of their marriage they were both gave the same address, but not that
occupied by James’ parents at the census. They may have already been living as man
and wife, in the same way that Robert Woodburn and Janet Miller were doing: they
appear as man and wife in the 1881 census, living at 3 Dunlop Street with no other
inhabitants of their household, but they did not actually marry until six weeks later in
mid-May.8
7
NB no standardisation has been done, so slight spelling variations may have meant some same
addresses have been missed.
8
I wanted to examine the proportion of couples cohabiting by length of time to marriage, but
unfortunately census-marriage links are not very complete, particularly for those who report themselves
as married in the census, but are actually single. Thus more work needs to be done on checking censusmarriage links for those who are apparently cohabiting at marriage. This will be done for a published
Conclusions
Rothimay shows significant levels of extra-marital sexual intercourse.
However it is a small rural area, and such patterns cannot be assumed to be
prevalent in other places. The unmarried mothers in Rothiemay often moved
away leaving their children with other family members. We cannot follow
their procreative careers once they leave the parish and cannot say if and when
marriage occurred.
Other rural areas (such as Skye) may have been characterized by a different
pattern of illegitimate childbearing where women brought back illegitimate
children they had borne elsewhere.
The corollary of this is that it is difficult to establish the early procreative
careers of in-migrants to larger urban areas, particularly when women are not
observed in the census previous to the birth of their first child observed in the
town.
Women seem to have accurately reported their marital status, particularly on
the birth certificates of their children.
Marriages in our communities were predominantly conducted according to
religious rites of some denomination.
Irregular marriages featured little in the lives of the inhabitants of Skye,
Kilmarnock and Rothimay.
A significant minority, particularly of marriages including widowed
individuals, appear to have involved a short period of pre-marital cohabitation.
Further research is needed to establish the prevalence and duration of such
arrangements.
One question-mark remains: we cannot confirm that couples reporting themselves as
having married outside our study communities were indeed registered as married on
the date and in the place they claim on the birth certificates of their children. Until it
becomes feasible to search for a large number of these marriages we cannot state
categorically that stating a marriage outside the place of birth of their children was not
a method to disguise the absence of a formal registered union.
version of this paper and will provide a fascinating insight into lengths of time people cohabited for:
whether it was a few weeks only or longer, and whether this differed for bachelor-spinster marriages
and others.
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Family formation, marriage and procreative
careers in late nineteenth century Scotland.
Alice Reid
Eilidh Garrett
Department of Geography
Faculty of History
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
University of Cambridge
Acknowledgements:
ESRC
Wellcome Trust
General Register Office for Scotland
(now National Records for Scotland)
Ros Davies, Andrew Blaikie
1
Civil registers of births
marriages and deaths
1861 – 1901
R o th i em a y
Census enumerators
books 1861, 1871, 1881,
1891 & 1901.
S k ye
Linked the two sets of
records.
Number of marriages 1861-1901
K il m a r n o c k
Kilmarnock
8,600
Skye
2,800
Rothiemay
300
2
3
Date and
place of
marriage
Name,
occupation &
marital status
of groom
(signature)
Denomination
Age of
each
party
Groom’s
father’s name
and
occupation,
mother’s
maiden name,
whether either
parent dead
Bride’s
Maiden name,
occupation &
Usual father’s name
and
marital status residence
of bride
of each occupation,
mother’s
party
maiden name,
(signature)
whether either
witnesses
parent dead
Signature of
official,
(signatures)
of
witnesses
Date and
place of
registration
signature of
registrar
4
5
19th Century Scotland had 4 forms of
marriage – all legal if involving proven
‘exchange of consent’.
1 Regular: Performed after banns by a
minister of any religious denomination
(after 1836). Responsibility of the couple
to register the marriage.
3 Irregular: declaration of marriage to a
Registrar, declaration to a magistrate or
to the Sheriff, or as the result of a
prosecution.
Also marriage ‘by habit and repute’ –
evidence of marriage (exchange of
consent), but did not constitute a
marriage. (Royal Commission on Laws of Marriage, 1868) 6
Percentages of all marriages conducted ‘by declaration’,
Scotland, Kilmarnock, Skye and Rothiemay 1861-1900
Location of marriages by declaration, Kilmarnock 1880s and 1890s.
7
A Scottish birth certificate: 1880
Name of child
Date
and
time of
birth
Place
of
birth
Sex
of
child
Name and
occupation
of father
Date and place
of parents
marriage
Name of
‘informant’
and relation
Date and
to child –
place of
whether
registration
signed
Name and maiden
surname of
mother
Name of registrar
8
Rothiemay: births 1861 – 1901
Type of birth
N
%
1294
77.7
2.  Illegitimate (both parents register)
127
7.6
3.  Illegitimate (mother only registers)
243
14.6
2
0.1
1666
100.0
1.  Legitimate*
4.  ? (father only registers)
Total births
22.2
* Legitimate births were those registered by both parents with information given about parents’ marriage, and no statement of illegitimacy.
Rothiemay: 769 ‘procreative units’
Legitimate
488
16
Illegitimate –
mother only
registers
3
155
16
10
81
Illegitimate
– both
parents
register
Mothers observed to have:
N
%
Legitimate children only
488
63.4
Illegit. and legit children
29
3.8
252
32.8
Illegit. children only
Of 488 ‘all legitimate’ families, 87 (11.3 % of total) observed to include a prenuptial conception.
In all therefore, 47.9% of fertile women observed in Rothiemay demonstrably began their 9
procreative careers before marriage
Co-residence of unmarried couples – not always easy to identify.
10
Percentage of couples bearing children in Kilmarnock before 1901 stating they
were married in Kilmarnock in selected years whose marriage cannot be found
in the civil registers of Kilmarnock.
11
Women claiming to be married in the census (with at least one birth registered in
Kilmarnock) but unwilling or unable to supply marriage information on their child’s
birth certificate: Kilmarnock 1871-1901
12
Percentage of couples giving precise street addresses on their
marriage certificates, where bride and groom record exactly the
same address for ‘usual residence’.
Not easy to calculate euivalent figures for 2 rural communities as addresses tend to
be given as by ‘hamlet’ or ‘township’
13
14
15
16