The term "l'enfant naturel" is new to me. It is a French expression meaning a natural child, one born out of wedlock. I had no idea that this condition (is that the right word?) would apply to my family line, not just once, and not even twice, but in three successive generations from 1836 to 1880. Wow.
So working backward as genealogists do, I came first to the civil registration of the birth of my great-grandmother, Marie Klein. She was born 13 Aug 1880 in Strasbourg, Alsace, Germany. But what's this? The name on the record is Marie Grimm. This record is written in German, so I had to ask for some translation help from the experts at the international desk at the Family History Library in SLC. Where usually the father's name is listed was instead the name of the midwife. The mother was then described as a single (unmarried) servant girl named Cecile Pauline Grimm. Wow #1.
Ok, so now let's look at Pauline. We have her death certificate from Brooklyn in 1921 but it has always been confusing because her father was listed as Henry Kitzinger and her mother Salome Grimm. How does that work? Well, this way. Finding now the civil registration for the birth of Pauline on 26 Feb 1860 in Strasbourg, the first thing it says is that she was the "fille naturelle" (here's our new expression, "natural girl") of unmarried Salome Grimm, and then it proceeds to list Salome's parents as George Grim and Rosina Hieber of Kutzenhausen. Francois Henri Kertzinger was the man Salome married in 1866, well after Pauline's birth. Henry Kertzinger was Pauline's step-father. Wow #2.
Surely, that's enough surprise to go around - a mother and daughter both born outside the institution of marriage. At that point, it seemed a good time to stop asking questions, because after all, there is a limit to how far back is far enough.
Except that I have a funny need for completeness. When looking at my "new and revised" family tree where some ancestors have known mothers and unknown fathers, I realized that I had not attached a civil registration record for Salome even though one is available for the time she was born. Unable to find such record, I went back to check Salome's marriage record, the one to Mssr. Kertzinger that occurred AFTER the birth of Pauline. This record is terribly out of focus, so as I was squinting at it, I saw what I had not seen before, that she was born "hors le mariage" - outside of marriage. Whoa! Stretching my eye strain, I came up with a birth date of 7 Aug 1836 and a place of St. Marie aux Mines in Haut-Rhin. Lots of digging and churning later, there she was, the next l'enfant naturel. Salome was "reconnu" meaning recognized. George Grimm claimed that he was the father of the female child whom he wanted to name Salome, and that she was born of Miss Rosine Hiebert. Wow #3.
And there we have it - three generations of women, and direct ancestors at that, born outside of wedlock. At first I was taken aback with it all, maybe even a little ashamed. Now I find myself slightly amused, partly at the situation and partly at my own apparent inheritance of social judgments about such things. Try even a two-minute google search with these keywords: 'nineteenth century' europe france marriage illegitimate children. The resulting reading is intriguing. Suffice it to say that one-third of children born in 19th-century France were natural. 183 years ago was a different time and place, and the birth of any child was less the subject of moral judgment. Moreover, their survival is how I got here.
So let me state for the record, I am thrilled at discovering what is essentially a small matrilineal pocket in my family tree: three generations of women, my grandmothers, whose mothers were unmarried, and two of those generations whose fathers went unrecorded. These women and their baby girls survived and kept moving forward in a world that was changing fast irregardless of gender. May we all, and especially their many descendants, honor their memory gratefully.
