QUEER BIRTH FACTS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 203, 20 April 1932, Page 3

QUEER BIRTH FACTS

STRANGE STATISTICS FROM MANY * LANDS. AUSTRALIAN FIGURES. Australian records can produce nothing to compare • with the amazing overseas birth statistics mentioned in a recent cable — of sequences of triplets and twins in the one family — but there has been more than one instance of the unsual, says a Sydney writer. At Mullumbimby in 1930 four boys were born at the one time, but three died. In the same year an official return showed that there had been 11 triplets and 1412 twins. One child born during the year was the seventeenth, another the eighteenth, and a third the twenty-first. Mothers included seven aged 13, 26 aged 14, and 140 aged 15. Some years ago, too, a case was . reported of a grandmother aged 26. Grandmothers under 30 are common in the East Indies. On board the Dutch steamer Le Maire. which visited Sydney about 18 months ago, were a grandmother aged 28, mother aged 14, and child one year. An American record claims that an 18-year-old girl was the mother of 10 children. ' A Newfoundland bishop reported in 1849 the presence of seven generations in a fishing village, the oldest woman beng under 90. In the early part of this century a baby born, in Indiana was stated to he the fourteenth daughter of a fourteenth daughter, and in 1913 in the same State, the eleventh daughter of an eleventh daughter of an eleventh daughter was born. Twins .sometimes are responsible for queer tangles. In one case, they were born in different centuries, one a little before the midnight that end'ed the 19th century, and the other in the first minutes of the 20th. In 1914 a son was born to a Lancashire family, and, six weeks later, a twin sister appeared. Anoth'er queer case was that in 1485, in a titled family, when three boys were born on successive Sundays.