Daily AncestorStepmother
A stepmother is the later wife of your father, not your birth mother; old records sometimes called her mother-in-law.
A stepmother is the woman your father married after your mother died or the marriage ended. Stepfather is the male form. In older records the step-relation was sometimes written as an in-law term.
A stepmother can be close in age to the oldest children. If a mother in a census is suspiciously young for the eldest child, she may be a second wife.
As seen in a recordRelationship column of the 1880 census
Mary Hart, Step-mother, Wd, 48
How to cite this page
Daily Ancestor. "Stepmother." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/relationships/stepmother. Last checked 2026-10-01.