Large Families.

Manawatu Herald, 7 November 1896, Page 2

Large Families.

There is one colonist residing in Wellington who is frequently writing to the p-ipfu'H to urge the Government to 'i. low him, and others like unto him a grant for every child thf-y have or may have. Yet this in in ouly claims ten children. To quieten him down we will quote aoine veal families :— Some years ago a Louden paper offered a prize to the Englishwoman with the largest family. The numbers ranged all the way frum sixteen to twenty-five, the irophy being eventually divided b> tween two ladies, one from, ; Lambeth and the other from Bethnai Green, who had each had twenty -five children. In earlier times, however, these families, phenomenal as they are, would not have been accounted anything out of the way. A record in the British Museum speaks of a Scottish weaver who had, by one wife, no fewer than sixty-two children, of whom four daughters lived to be women and forty-six sons attained manhood. Most of them were living at Newcastle in 1670. An inscription on a tomb in Conway churchyard records that Nicholas Hocker was the forty-first child of his father by one wife, and the father himself of twenty-seven children. When Charles Y. entered Ghent as Count of Flanders an old gentleman rode at the head .of the procession in front of a troop of his twenty one son?, who, it may be added, had ten sisters. According to a local history of Cumberland, at a place called Kirton le-Moor, in 1797, " a man and his wife, accompanied by thirty children, might have been seen proceeding to church to the christening of the thirty first."