Before the Guinness Book of Records, there was Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896, W. B. Saunders) by George Milbrey Gould (1848-1922) and Walter Lyttle Pyle (1871-). They devote an entire chapter to prolificity.
In 1853, peasant Iakov Kirilow, 70 years old, was presented to the Empress of Russia for having 72 children.. His first wife had given 57 children in 21 pregnancies; including three twins, seven triplets and four quadruplets. He remarried, and his second wife bore him 15 children: six twins and one triplet. Thus, he had 72 children in total, and amazingly, all were alive at the time of presentation.
It is hard to believe that, after more than a century, I am first to notice this, but those numbers simply do not add up. Those 3+7+4=14 tuplet pregnancies of his first wife total 6+21+16=43 children, so an additional 21-14-=7 pregnancies that resulted in single births bring the total number of children to 50, not 57. Either there were more pregnancies, more tuplets, or less children.
Here is the actual passage (Project Gutenberg and Google Books provide the same text):
Peasant Kirilow was presented to the Empress of Russia in 1853, at the age
of seventy years. He had been twice married, and his first wife had presented
him with 57 children, the fruits of 21 pregnancies. She had quadruplets four
times, triplets seven times, and twins thrice. By his second wife he had 15
children, twins six times, and triplets once. This man, accordingly, was the
father of 72 children, and, to magnify the wonder, all the children were alive
at the time of presentation.
.
I am guessing that a transcription or translation error crept into Gould & Lyttle’s account.
The Virginia Medical Journal, volume 10 (1858, p. 182) states it is four
quadruplets, seven triplets and ten (not three) twins. That does add up to 57
children in 21 pregnancies. It mentions a number of the Magazine of Natural
History, &c. of Moscow
as the source.
The documented record for most children is held by Feodor Vassilyev (1707 -
1782), a Russian peasants from Shuya, and his first wife (name not recorded). In a period of fifty years, from 1725 to 1765, they had sixteen
twins, seven triplets and four quadruplets, That’s 69 children in total. And oh,
Feodor remarried to have six twins and two triplets with his second wife, That’s
another 18 children, and thus 87 children in total.
All births were registered in the local Orthodox Monastery. In 1782, only three
children had been buried, and 84 survived. Empress Catherine the Great was
informed about the family, and supported the family with numerous gifts.
Both the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg and the French Academy are said
to have records of this case.
The book by Marie M. Clay
(Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN-10: 521412234, ISBN-13: 9780521412230)
cites an contemporary account in the 1783 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine
(1783, 53, 753), Bashutskiy’s Saint Petersburg Panorama (1834), and the
medical journal The Lancet (1878, 1, 189) which quotes M. Hermann’s Travaux Statistiques de la Russie.
A family having multiple multiplets may be rare, but it is far from impossible. On 2003 November 6, The Guardian reported that Fatma Saygi, a Turkish woman of 28 from the Adiyaman province, was about to give birth to her sixth triplet.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the record for multiple triplets is held by Maddalena Granata, who lived in the Italian city of Nocera. She was married at 28, and bore 52 children, 49 of which were males, between 1839 and 1886. She had triplets fifteen times.
The Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine is probably the source for most mentions of Kirilow and Vassilyev, who had 72 and 87 children respectively. That is a lot already, but a man can have many more.
They give several examples of extreme paternity.
Artaxerxes was supposed to have had 106 children; Conrad, Duke of Moscow,
80; and in the polygamous countries the number seems incredible. Herotinus was
said to have had 600, and Jonston also quotes instances of 225 and even of 650
in the Eastern countries.
.
Recently [1896] there have been published accounts of the alleged experiments
of Luigi Erba, an Italian gentleman of Perugia, whose results have been
announced. About forty years of age and being quite wealthy, this bizarre
philanthropist visited various quarters of the world, securing women of
different races; having secured a number sufficient for his purposes, he retired
with them to Polynesia, where he is accredited with maintaining a unique
establishment with his household of females. In 1896, just seven years after the
experiment commenced, the reports say he is the father of 370 children.
If you decide to try and document Vassilyev’s family, don’t try to use Legacy 6
to do so. It has a hard-coded limit of 60 children per family.
Brother’s Keeper 6.x has a limit of 75 children per family.
Best practice is to not reserve room for a fixed maximum of children, but allow any number of children. A maximum of 255 children (the highest number that fits in an 8-bit byte) seems more than enough for the foreseeable future, but seems unadvisable for anything but memory-restrained implementations. The practical maximum should be way beyond current records, to allow even the most unlikely situation. A maximum of 32.767 (the highest 16-bit number) seems well beyond what will occur in practice.
Added link to Desperate wives and the man known as Derek who fathered about 500 children with women whose war hero husbands were too shell-shocked to make love, the story of man who provided a secret service, fathering children for couples because the husbands, World War I veterans, were no longer able to do so themselves.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.