Research your history for long enough, and it’s highly likely you’ll eventually find an ancestor single mother. In 1861, the Registrar General reported that almost one in ten births in Scotland were to single mothers, so if say your greatgrandparents were all born around that time, it would be more likely than not that at least one of them was born illegitimate. Certainly in my own family, that’s true – my great- grandfather, Robert Wilson Smith, was born in Elizabeth Smith, an domestic servant. In years of civil registration, over 150,000 children were born in Scotland with no fathers’ name in the birth registers.