Thomas Fearns and Catherine Fearns. Whats her name?

[Janet]

I'm a newcomer to this discussion, but John and Elizabeth Fearnes were my great-great-grandparents.

As far as I know, they had six children - four boys and two girls: Thomas, Henry, James, Mary Ann, Charles and Elizabeth.

Life is complicated because Thomas and Charles (my great-grandfather), used the same names for their children who, being cousins, are in a similar age group. Charles son Henry Edward (my grandfather) married Mary Jane Owen-Owen and again used many of the same names.

I can only presume that John and Elizabeth's other children did likewise.

I recently found a bench dedicated to an Ellen Florence Fearns (1900-1982) in Calderstones Park in Liverpool. She was not my aunt Helena (Nellie), born in 1915, but is surely a relation.

[MaryA]

Hi and welcome to the forum, and thanks for the additional information.

The original post is quite sometime ago but I hope the original poster receives notification that you have added a reply and comes along to check this post out.

[Janet]

Thanks

[AndyJ]

Just meandering... surmising....
What if Catherine's father John was born a McGaa but was brought up as a Daley? If his parents were never married he should have retained his mother's maiden name McGaa. Adoption did not exist so that rules out that as a name change reason. If he married as a Daley he married under an assumed name without legal authority. While a technicality was still illegal. His children, while probably registered as Daley, were in fact McGaa.

As this thread seems to have come alive again and I have just read it through for the first time, I hope Dickiesam won't mind me commenting on part of his posting quoted above.

He's right that prior to the 1926 Adoption Of Children Act the state didn't formally get involved in adoptions, but that is not quite the same as saying that, prior to 1926, 'adoption didn't exist' or that assuming the family name of the adoptive parents was somehow illegal. To be clear, the law didn't care. So, yes, the birth should have been registered in the mother's maiden name if there was no father named at registration (bastardy being a very common reason for adoption), but it was very normal for a child to be brought up under the name of his/her adoptive parents. My mother was adopted shortly after birth (1919) and so I have done quite a lot of research into this subject. For anyone seeking more information about adoption in earlier times, I can recommend an excellent source book entitled In the Family Way by Jane Robinson and published by Penguin Viking in 2015 (ISBN 978-0-670-92206-2).

A child who was adopted as an infant is unlikely to have even known their mother's name, as the fact of adoption was very often covered up, and if the adoption had been facilitated by an adoption agency or charity, as many were, they would have inserted a chinese wall between the birth mother and the adoptive parents, meaning that the adoptive parents were given few details about the birth mother. In the case of foundling babies, the agency might not have known the name of the birth mother either, and given those circumstances, such births might not have been registered. It worth remembering that although the GRO started maintaining an Adoption Register following the 1926 Act, it wasn't until 1976 that adopted people had the legal right to access their adoption records, and even then lots of safeguards were put in place to ensure everyone consented to the release of information, and that counselling was on hand for some of the inevitable shocks which might occur.

Of course none of that throws any light on the McGaa/Daley situation, so apologies for going off topic a bit.