STPA,
I have a suggestion as to how you might be able to find the boy’s birth. Firstly I would work out out when Daphne was born. (Perhaps you have her birth or death certificates? Do you know when her parents married? They should all give you a start date). Then I would search birth records from the year when she was 16, for perhaps 10 to 15 years onwards. That’s not as daunting as it sounds.
I assume the birth was in Belfast. I searched randomly chosen years (1912 – 1916) for male Davis births in Belfast that were illegitimate. There were 35 Davis births but only 1 illegitimate. (Births without a father’s name only have 1 surname in the indexes – ie the mother’s – so they easily stand out.). So if Daphne were born in 1925 and you were to search male Davis births in Belfast 1941-56 you might find somewhere between say 1 and 10 that were illegitimate. You could then pay to view them (£2.50 a time on GRONI) to see if any had Daphne as the mother.
One possible snag is that if the father is named on the certificate then it won’t be obvious from the indexes that it’s an illegitimate birth. (If the father attended the registration and admitted paternity then his name could go on the certificate. Otherwise it was the mother’s name only. I’d guess that in this case, given who the father allegedly was, he probably didn’t confirm paternity).
The next snag is that births for the years you need are not on-line. They are open to the public but not routinely on-line. If you go to GRONI or PRONI in Belfast in person (when they are fully open) you can search there, but no other location or website has the information for births in NI after 1921. You could also contact GRONI by phone or e-mail and ask them to search for you, but I would imagine there will be extra fees for that.
If the child was formally adopted, I think the birth record will be noted to that effect but – as I understand it – it will not give any information about the identity of the adoptive parents, or of any new name the child may have been given. GRONI should have that information on their adoption register but I think that is closed save to the adoptive person and perhaps certain others. If you find the birth, you could ask GRONI for advice but I am not sure if you can get the information you want.
I attended a public lecture given by the Deputy Director of GRONI a year or two back and someone asked who could see an adoptive child’s records. The answer was the child could, plus the birth mother could also request it, but there were certain criteria. What happens if they are both dead? The answer was no-one can access the records. That’s my recollection but as I say you would need to check with GRONI. I may not have got it quite right.
