SOME AMAZING FAMILY RECORDS.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 143646, 14 November 1911, Page 8

SOME AMAZING FAMILY RECORDS.

A WIFE AT TWELVE. In those clays of “tardy marriages and reluctant motherhood,” to quote an eminent physician, it is refreshing to read of tho Manchester lady who is proudly nursing her grandchild while still on tho sunny side of 30—an age at which many of her sisters arc still coquetting with Cupid, and evidently in no hurry to wear a bridal veil. But such precocious “grand-mater-nity,” if uncommon, is no great novelty after all. There was a Lady Child, of whom wo read, who was a wife at 12, had her first baby before she saw her thirteenth birthday, and blossomed into a grandmother at 27, at the very time when her elder sister was enjoying her first honeymoon. Horace Walpole, too, tells us that ho knew six living generations of one family, the descendants of a Mrs. God-

frey.' “Begin with her,” he says, “thin count her daughter, Lady Waldegrave; .then the latter's son, the ambassador; his daughter, Lady Harriet Beard; her daughter, the present Countess Dowager of I'owis ; and her daughter, Lady Clive. There are six, and a seventh is expected shortly.”

• Lady Child had a rival in a Mrs. Cooper, of King’s Bromley, who, according to Dr. Plot, “lived to be a beldam ; that is, to see the sixth' generation, and could say the same I have heard reported of another: ‘Rise up, daughter, and go to thy daughter, for thy "daughter’s daughter hath a daughter.’ ”

A correspondent writing to the Standard a few years ago tells a still more remarkable story of family fecundity. “While travelling in Newfoundland,” he says, “I saw in a fisherman’s tilt seven generations, all females. The youngest was a newly-born infant; its mother-was 12 years of ago; its grandmother 20; and so upward. The age of the groat - great - groat - great - grandmother was such as to render it quite possible that before she died she might see a member of an eighth generation.” In Byfelt, Massachusetts, there wore living, in 1887, six generations of one family, the ages ranging from a few months to 95 years; and Skillington, near Grantham, boasted, a few years ago, five generations of tho family of Duffin.

Remarkable as these records are, they are no more astonishing than the achievement of a Mrs. Josephine Ormsby, of Chicago, who during the first seven years of her wedded life presented her husband with. 14 children in tho following alarming sequence: One set of triplets, two pairs of twins, throe oingle children, and one set of quadruplets. And even this sensational contribution to the population was eclipsed by the wife of a. Parisian baker who, became the mother of 21 children in seven batches—all in the space of seven years 1

Before Mrs. Mary Jonas died at Chester a short time ago she was able to boast that she had added 33 children to the census returns of tho United Kingdom; but even Mrs. Jonas’s achievement has been thrown into tho shade more than once by some of her parental predecessors. There was a Scottish weaver living some 30 miles from Edinburgh who, if the records speak truly, “had no fewer than 62 children by ono wife, all of whom were born alive, and of whom 46 lived to he'2l and upwards.” , And did not Thomas Grcenhill, the Duke of Norfolk's surgeon, apply for an augmentation in his coat-of-arms on the, ground that ho. was ‘the seventh son and, thirty-ninth child of one father and. mother,?”

Of late paternity the examples are no lees wonderful. Take tho case of Sir William Nicolson, of Glenbervy, whoso wife presented him with a fine baby girl in May, 1766. “What is very singular,” the Edinburgh Courant says, when recording the event, “Sir William is at present 92 years of age, and has a daughter alive of his first marriage aged 66. He married his present lady, by whom ,he has now had six children, when he was 82.”

When Thomas Beatty, of Drumcondra, near Dublin, had passed his hundredth birthday, he was able to point to one son, a strapping young man of 73 summers, and to another, a few days old, who was just learning to suck-the bottle.

William Brest, , of Galphay, near Ripon, left behind him at his death eight children, the eldest of whom was within two years of his ninetieth birthday, while the youngest had only seen 16 years of life; while the late,Lord Leicester, as will be remembered, left a son nearly half a century younger than his eldest sister, and 22 years junior to his own nephew, the present Earl of Dunmoro.

To what extent a family may multiply within tho period of a single lifetime is shown by the case of an oldtimo Lady Temple, of Stow, who nursed her seven hundredth descendant, before she gave up the ghost; and even more striking is the famous Kentucky family of Webb, of whom three brothers, and as many sisters, all living a few years ago, counted their descendants to tho amazing number of 1650.