HER SIXTY-SECOND CHILD.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2148, 6 July 1920, Page 4

HER SIXTY-SECOND CHILD.

FAAHLIES THAT ALUvE ONE GASP. Airs Ravvlinson, a Peterborough woman, who recently presented her husband with a second set of: triplets in just over four years, may well he proud of such a generous contribution to next year’s census; but splendid as such a record is, it has been eclipsed many times by still more prolific mothers. Not long ago a Airs Ormsby had increased the population by four at one birth; and this was but an incident in a truly amazing In the short space of seven years Airs Ormsby bad counted her offspring to fourteen. Beginning with triplets, she had followed up this excellent start with two pairs of twins, three single “little strangers,” and a hatch of four.

But even Airs Ormsby must have felt not a little jealous of the Belgian woman, Alme. Frasues, who some years ago actually added .six to her already large flock of hoys and girls in the „short space of twelve months. And what shall wc say of the wife of a Paris baker, who filled her nursery with twentyone children in seven years, each of which unfailingly produced its quota of triplets.

But it is not necessary to proceed at such a rate to accumulate families of portentious size, In the College of Heralds you may see today the petition of one Thos. Greenhill, to the Earl Marshal, praying that “in consideration of your petitioner being the seventh son and the thirty-ninth child of one father and mother, your Grace would be pleased to signalise it by some particular mark or augmentation in my

coat-of-arms, to transmit to posterity so uncommon a thing.” The petitioner might have added that he first opened his eyes when his mother had passed her fiftieth birthday.

And even Airs Greenhill might have felt a spasm of envy if she had heard aof the wife of a Scottish weaver who lived to nurse her sixty-second child —all by one fath-er—-and to see forty-six of them grown men and women.

After such records we read without emotion of the Cumberland couple who, one day in 1797, proceeded to church, accompanied by thirty of their children, to the christening of number thirty-one. Nor are we disposed to cast any doubt on the claim of Airs Parkinson, wife'of a Yorkshire farmer, to have given birth to thirty-eight children, thus eclipsing by two the achievement of Airs Helen Urquhart, of Cromarty. Mrs Alary Jonas, before she died at Chester some twenty years ago, could point to thirty-three entries for which she was responsible in (he birth register. And it was not long after that a Air Anthony Clark startled the judge at the Clcrkcnwcll County Court by pleading guilty to being the father of thirty-two children.

In Canada, where large families are more common than on this side of the Atlantic, Air Braskaw recently qualified as father of his for-ty-first child; and at Kingston, in Jamaica, there are living to-day three sisters whose joint families number sixty-four.

But a woman may he content with quite a modest family of her own, and yet, before she dies, count her descendants in hundreds. Lady Temple, of Stowe, for example, only had a dozen children in her own nursery, and yet she lived to dandle her seven hundredth descendant on her knees. Lady Temple has had not a few rivals —among them Mrs Iloneywood, a woman of Kent, who nursed her ninth great-great-grand-child on her ninety-third birthday. And this latest addition to her family circle wtis the three hundred and sixty-seventh on the list. Still more astonishing is the record of two brothers named Webb, and a sister, who are still living in Kentucky, whose living descendants number one thousand and sev-enty-six, towards which imposing aggregate the elder brother has contributed four hundred and fortyfour, the younger four hundred and two, and the sister a relatively modest two hundred and thirty.