Father's name blank

[Mike Deptford]

Hello everyone. I must have posted here in the past but not recently so..
I have a household in the 1850 -1870 range where several of the births have father's name blank.
From recent DNA results we are reasonably certain the father is the same man. On a couple of the certificates he is named but on many others his name is blank.
Why would this be? In all the cases he is not married to the mother including a couple where he is named. They did not have the same problems with claiming benefits as we do nowadays so not sure what would be gained by leaving his name blank.
Any suggestion welcome. Or am I just being naive?

[gardener]

I've a feeling that unless the father was present for the registration then some registrars refused to enter a name. Other's may have been less picky.

[Mike Deptford]

Thanks gardner, that makes sense. However if all registras were so picky we would have lots of blank space fathers. The family seems to have lived happily so still looking for other explanations.

[Northern Lass]

moved to misc. section.

[gardener]

Thanks gardner, that makes sense. However if all registras were so picky we would have lots of blank space fathers. The family seems to have lived happily so still looking for other explanations.

There is something here about rules for entering the father's name (it is a commercial site so you may want to double-check the facts)
https://www.ukofficialrecords.co.uk/Bir ... ficate.asp

It could be interesting to make a table of the date of birth, with information from columns 4 to 9, where appropriate. Just to see if there is any pattern.

I suspect though that it was probably fairly random. It depended very much on the informant and a little bit on the registrar.

[Mike Deptford]

Thanks again. I found the information very interesting. I have one certificate with father's name but the others (dates before and after this cert) leave his name blank. Sometimes father's surname was given as second (christian) name of the child.