In a message dated 3/31/2010 3:46:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: > Perhaps the priest. Most don't give a lot of detail (the supply of paper > and ink could be one factor). I remember sitting once with George Pacheco > in N.Dartmouth and I found a baptism that didn't follow the norm. George > took a look and in the baptism the priest documented that he asked the > mother 3 times who the father was and she stated every time she didn't know, > but that the priest felt that she did indeed know who the father of her baby > was. And he wrote something to that effect in the document. Another time, > on a marriage, there was a line that didn't follow the norm (or it was the > first time that I had ancestors get married around Easter). It said that > they had fulfilled their Lenten duties or something like that. In this particular case I would venture to guess that the priest had heard the annual obligatory Easter Duty confession of the "father" and the priest may very well have known who the father was. But, because he was bound by the seal of confession, he could never confront the child's mother and tell her that "so and so" had told him in confession that he had fathered a child with... Those small villages had one (maybe 2) priests. They knew everybody personally, and since Easter Duty was obligatory, they heard everybody's confession every year. They knew who was having illicit sex with whom. They knew who had abandoned their baby. Those priests must have suppressed smiles when they recorded "pai não sabido". Happy Easter!
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