Unwed parents difficult to track

A car is in the driveway, but that might not mean much.

Penny Huston knocks on the door and hopes that the person who answers matches the name on the court document in her hand.

Nope.

"She says he doesn't live here anymore," Huston said. "It goes this way a lot."

At least a hundred times a week, the process server for Subpoena Service Plus parks outside a house or taps a car window or maybe even pretends to deliver flowers -- whatever it takes to serve the court papers seeking support for a child.

The job gets tougher as relationships between parents grow ever more tenuous: Sixty percent of the cases the Franklin County Child Support Enforcement Agency handles involve mothers and fathers who didn't marry in the first place.

"There may be no bond at all," agency Director Susan Brown said. "It's challenging."

The march away from matrimony -- about 40 percent of babies in the U.S. are born to single women -- also has made things hard for the legal system.

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