Old legal and record term 1500s-1800s
What does base born mean in old parish registers?
In a parish register, base born marks a child born outside marriage, entered under the mother's name. Clerks also wrote baseborn, spurious, or filius populi. The father's name sometimes surfaces in the linked bastardy papers even when the register is silent. You will meet it in parish registers and court records, mostly 1500s-1800s.
Where it appears: parish registers, court records.
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Related terms
Browse the full genealogy records glossary for more occupations, causes of death, and legal terms.
FAQs
Where will I see base born in the records?+
Mostly in parish registers and court records, 1500s-1800s. Clerks abbreviated freely and spelling wandered, so expect variant wordings around it.
Do these old terms still matter for family history?+
Yes, a single word can settle a relationship. Relict names a widow, et ux hides an unnamed wife, natural son points at a parent. The words are dry, but what they encode about a family is not.
Where do these definitions come from?+
They are drawn from period dictionaries, government archive glossaries, and standard genealogy references, cross-checked against each other; provenance is documented with the dataset. Inside AncestorIQ, Deep Research reads the record itself and explains terms like this in context, against your ancestor's own document.
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