Short answer. Yes. The rights of an illegitimate child are transmitted on his death to his descendants, whether those descendants are legitimate or illegitimate. The share they step into is measured by the current rule under the Family Code: one-half of a legitimate child's legitime.
What the law says
The rights of illegitimate children set forth in the preceding articles are transmitted upon their death to their descendants, whether legitimate or illegitimate.
Civil Code, Article 902 — Rights Pass to Descendants. Read the full provision →
The share does not die with the child
This is the anxiety behind the question: a son or daughter who was never married to the grandchild's other parent dies first, and the surviving relatives tell the grandchildren they have no claim on the grandparent's estate. The Civil Code says otherwise. The rights are transmitted upon their death to their descendants, and the article deliberately adds whether legitimate or illegitimate. So a grandchild is not disqualified because his own parent was illegitimate, and not disqualified again because he himself was born outside marriage. The line continues downward.
Read it with the current one-half rule
The article speaks of "the rights set forth in the preceding articles," and those older articles used a graduated scheme of sub-classes that the law has since abandoned. The Family Code (Executive Order No. 209, in force since 1988) now provides a single measure — each illegitimate child's legitime is one-half of a legitimate child's legitime — and expressly leaves all other Civil Code provisions on successional rights standing. So the transmission rule survives intact; only the size of what is transmitted is governed by the newer, simpler fraction. Anyone computing shares from the old sub-classes will arrive at a figure the law no longer recognises.
What the descendants actually receive
They take the share their parent would have taken, and they take it collectively, not each in full. Two grandchildren standing in the place of one deceased illegitimate child divide that one share between them; they do not double it. Their entitlement is also derivative — it can be no larger than what their parent would have had, and it carries the same limits. Practically, this means the estate is first divided as though the deceased child were still alive, and only then is his portion split among his own descendants.
The limits worth knowing before you rely on this
Two constraints trip families up. First, filiation must be provable at each link in the chain — the grandchild's relationship to the deceased parent, and that parent's relationship to the grandparent. A gap anywhere breaks the claim, and after two deaths the evidence is harder to assemble, which is why birth records and acknowledgments should be secured early rather than reconstructed later. Second, a separate rule of the Code bars intestate succession between an illegitimate child and the legitimate relatives of his parent. That barrier does not affect inheriting from the parent's own estate, but it can block a claim that reaches sideways or further up the family tree, and it is the single most common reason a claim that looks obvious to the family fails in law.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Heirs of Serapio Mabborang; Lauriano Mabborang, et al. vs. Hermogenes Mabborang and Benjamin Mabborang, G.R. No. 182805, April 22, 2015 — read the decision on LawPhil →