SOME WONDERFUL FAMILIES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue XIV, 2 April 1898, Page 426

SOME WONDERFUL FAMILIES.

Families of a dozen and one or two more are so common in this land of ours as to excite very little comment when additions are made to them; but when the total number tops the score the parents are usually regarded as celebrities. Only recently a country lady presented her lord and master with a twenty-second; and not long ago the prize in a large family competition, organised in London, had to be divided between two - worthy matrons who each boasted offspring to the number of twenty-five. Remarkable as are these cases, however, they pale into insignificance when compared with the record families of our forefathers. In 1698, a surgeon of the name of Greenhill presented a petition to the Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, in which he stated that he was the seventh son and the thirty-ninth child of one father and mother, and begged that so uncommon a thing should be signalised by an addition to the petitioner’s coat of arms, and the gift of some particular motto which would be transmitted to posterity. It is understood that Greenhill’s desire was granted. A tomb in Conway churchyard has the following inscription upon it: — ‘Here lyeth the body of Nicholas Hocker, of Conway, gentleman, who was the forty-first child of his father, William Hocker, by Alice, his wife, and the father of twenty-seven children; 1637.’ Evidently Hocker, junior, had in some measure kept up the traditions of the family. A local history of the county of Cumberland tells "us that 100 years ago at a place called Kirton-le-Moor, a man and his wife, accompanied by their thirty children, might have been seen proceeding to church to the christening of the thirty-first. If this procession had been made a custom at each birth, the elder sons and daughters must have been getting rather tired of it by this time. Probably the most remarkable case ever heard of, however, is that which is recorded in what are known as the Harleian manuscripts which lie in the British Museum. An entry has been discovered there indicating that a Scottish weaver had no fewer than sixty-two children given to him by one wife, who was also a native of the land o’ cakes. Only four of the girls attained maturity; but forty-six of the sons became men; and it was stated that most of them were living at New-castle-on-Tyne in the year 1670. Really big families are far more common in Germany nowadays than here and a reeent report issued by the Statistical Society of Berlin, concerning one year’s births in that city, should have been enough to have made the Parisians, .with their alarmingly low birth rate, turn green with envy. One wife presented her husband with her twenty-third child, two with their twenty-first, one with her twentieth, two with their nineteenth, six with their eighteenth, and seven with their seventeenth. A large number of more youthful mothers are bidding fair to rival these achievements of their elders, for it appears that one young wife, only twenty-three years old, has become a mother for the ninth time, one aged twenty-one for the seventh, and one aged nineteen for the fifth, whilst five, wives who have only seen eighteen summers have been so blessed three times, and one who is but vet sixteen is twice a mother.