Speaker: Yvonne Chapman

Yvonne will talk about attitudes to babies and bastards in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, specifically in the Parish of Allensmore. She will likely cover:

• Baptism records: numbers including how many categorised as natural born / accuracy of & gaps in the records
• Death records: infant / early mortality
• Role of the parish in caring for both the poor and bastards: bastardy bond examples in Allensmore / removal of bastards to their original parish / Allensmore outsources its poor relief in 1780 & the contract has clauses relating to the infant poor / pregnant single women
• Church wardens’ presentments & accounts: e.g. evidence of paying for coffins/ shrouds for poor children
• Coroner’s records: e.g. infanticide / still-birth
• The Pateshall Family: compare/contrast with gentry attitudes; ensuring a succession; Edmund Burnam Pateshall and his layette pincushion (now in V&A) [the story of how I tracked down Edmund’s portrait to Scarborough is also interesting in terms of sources to use] ; the ‘baby in the basket’ story/evidence who Edmund brings up as his protégé; Edmund and his wife’s attitudes to pregnant servants/bastardy through their own letters

At the Eden Centre and online.

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