Recording Unnamed Infants Guide
Once you start digging into individual family units you’ll quickly realise the unfortunate fact that a lot of children were stillborn or within a few days of birth. Recording Unnamed Infants is often crucial when trying to understand the mindset and mental health of ancestors.
How do you keep your Genealogy Records? Paper or Online?
An example I came across recently was my 2x Great Grandmother. I had three recorded children in my tree and I was in the stage of researching my family tree when I was searching GRO for surname/maiden name for each segment to make sure I had all children added as sometimes they don’t appear in censuses with the parents. I noticed in the 1911 Census she had eleven children in her life thus far.
Once I’d searched I discovered the remaining children and that five of them had been registered Unnamed. I wondered how to add these in to my family tree and found the following best practice.
The usual way would be to record unnamed Infants only the family name. However any additional information should also be noted, like sex for example as “Male Surname” or “Female Surname”. You should never make up names or use a phrase like “stillborn” or “baby” etc.
In short, always make sure you only ever use information that is fact.
For more tips and tricks check out this section!