In the US colonies / early America. Sorry for omitting that from the title.
I'm doing some genealogical research, and my 4th great grandfather, Otis, had his mother's maiden name; however, he was born to her when she was married. In the Massachusetts Compiled Birth, Marriage, and Death records, as well as the birth records by town, only Otis' mother, Abigail, was noted as a parent.
But Abigail was married to a man with a different last name before and after the birth in 1789. And Otis is not named among this man's child elsewhere.
I'm curious what possible reasons could be for this; initially I assumed we had some cousin-loving going on, but with the marriage inclusive of birth years, I'm confused. Could Abigail have been screwing around on her husband? Or maybe a younger sibling had a child out of wedlock?
Do we know anything about Abigail's family of origin? While it was nearly unheard of among the puritans for a woman not to take her husband's surname, in English societies of an earlier period, it would sometimes happen if the wife's family was of substantially greater social and economic status, the husband and his children would take the wife's name. But that practice was on the wane by the 15th century, and functionally extinct by the late 16th century, as surnames became more fixed to male lines of descent.
So I have no certainty what's going on here. An illegitimate child by Abigail seems the most probable happenstance, but I'm not sure it's the only one possible. If Abigail had birthed a child (Otis) which was reasonably known not to be her husbands (a difficult thing to prove in the 18th century, but not impossible), I would expect there to be some sort of court records about a adultery inquest, but maybe not if her husband had strong reasons to overlook her transgression, although I refuse to speculate what those reasons might have been.
OP, would you be willing to provide more details, like Abigail's last name? Did Abigail and her husband have other children, and did those children have the husband's surname?