This article uses a combination of sources, ranging from statistical material calculated from parish records, through oral history interviews and autobiographies, to letters sent by parish priests to their bishop, to illuminate the spaces between law, marriage and the church in the Gurk valley of southern Austria. It argues that local patterns and trends of illegitimacy were tolerated by the Catholic clergy, and that the relationships concerned were understood both as marriage without ceremonialization, and as stable unions where marriage was impeded by poverty. These attitudes hardened in the state legal practices that formed part of Nazi family policy and reduced rural illegitimacy.