HER SIXTY-SECOND CHILD.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 July 1920, Page 11

HER SIXTY-SECOND CHILD.

FAMILIES THAT MAKE ONE GASP. Mrs. Rawlinson, a Peterborough woman, who recently presented her husband with a second set of triplets in just over four years, may well be proud of such a generous contribution to next year's census; but splendid ac such a record is, it lias been eclipsed many times by still more prolific mothers. Not long ago a Mrs. Ormsby had increased the population by four at one birth; and this was but an incident in ; <t, truly amazing record. In the short 1 apace of seven years Mrs. Ormsby had ! counted her oiTspving to fourteen. Be- ; ginning with triplets, sue had followed I up this excellent start with two pairs of twins, three single "little strangers," and a batch of four. But even Mrs. Ormsby must have felt ! not a little jealous of the Belgian woman, Mme. Frasnes, who some years ago Actually added six to her already large flock of boys and girls in the short, space of twelve months. And what shall we say of the wife of a Paris baker, who filled her nursery with | twenty-one children in seven years, each of which unfailingly produced its quota of triplets. But it is not necessary to proceed at I such a rate to accumulate families of 1 ' portentious' size. In the College of Heralds you may see to-day the peti- ' tion of one Thos. Greenhill, to the Earl i Marshal, praying that "in consideration i I of your petitioner being the seventh j son and the thirty-ninth child of one father a\d mother, your Grace would be" pleased to signalise it by some particut lar mark or augmentation in my coat-of-arms, to transmit to posterity so un- ' I common a thing." The petitioner might r i have added that he first opened his eyes ' when his mother had passed her fiftieth J birthday. 7 HUNDREDS OF DESCENDANTS. q And even Mrs. Greenhill might have 1 felt a spasm of envy if she had heard t> of the wife of a Scottish weaver who e lived to nurse her sixty-second child—- ? all by one father—and to see forty-six p of them grown men and women, r After such records we read without t. emotion of the Cumberland couple who. e one day in 1797, proceeded to church, e accompanied by thirty of their children, r to the christening of .number thirty-one. Nor are we disposed to cast any doubt - on the claim of Mrs. Parkinson, wife of t a Yorkshire farmer, to have given birth - to thirty-eight children, thus eclipsing - by two the achievement of Mrs. Helen [i Urquhart, of Cromarty. n Mrs. Mary Jonas, before she died at e Chester, some twenty years ago, could t point to thirty-three entries for which f she was responsible in the birth regis--1 ter. And it was not long after that i, a Mr. Anthony Clark startied the Judge e at the Clerkenwell County Court by pleading guilty to being the father of - thirty-two children. . !, In Canada, where large families are e more common than on this side of the r Atlantic, Mr. Braskaw recently qualified 3 as father of his forty-first child; and at - Kingston, in Jamaica, there are living e to-day three sister s whose joint families r number sixty-four. e But a woman may be content with e quite a modest family of her own, and e yet, before she dies, count her descende ants in hundreds. Lady Temple, of t Stowe, for example, only had a dozen rt children in her own nursery, and yet she e lived to dandle her seven hundredth v descendant on her knees. Lady Temple o has had not a few rivals—among them e Mrs. Honeywood, a woman of Kent, who y nursed her ninth great-great-grandchild on her ninety-third birthday. And this d latest addition to her family circle was 's the three hundred and sixty-seventh on ?- the list. v Still more astonishing is the record of it two brothers named Webb, and a sister, 7- who are still living in Kentucky, whose >t. living descendants njumber one thouv sand and seventy-six, towards which imit posins aggregate the elder brother has m contributed four hundred and fortyfour, the vounscr. fn«r hundred and two, and the sistor a relatively modest two hundred and thirty.