52 Ancestors Week 31: Large

Question

Time for the next 52 Ancestors challenge...

Please share with us a profile of an ancestor or relative who matches this week's theme:

Large

Share below.

You don't need to share every week to participate, but those who do will earn badges. If this is your first time participating and you don't have the participation badge, or if you pass a milestone (13 shared profiles in 13 weeks, 26 in 26, or 52 in 52) let us know here. For more about the challenge, click here.

Comments

I have a different kind of large. My extended family tree is large, because I was adopted. My bio tree is very extensive as all of my ancestors were in America prior to the Revolutionary War. Most of them came from the British Isles and have traceable roots.

I also include my adoptive family, of which my parents were both first generation Americans, their parents coming from Finland and the Finnish part of Sweden. With help I have traced all lines back quite far.

I have even done research on my stepfather’s family into Finland.  

As a history buff, all of this fascinates me.

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My husband's father was 1 of 17 children, son of John Arthur Ryan and Mary Kathleen Robichaud http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ryan-11324

Answer 1

2G Grandmother Jessie (Lawrie) McIntosh had a large family.  She and her husband Angus had 10 children, all born in the last quarter of the 19th Century, who survived to adulthood.

Answer 2

Large means for me large family.

One of my maternal ancestors (Johann Gottfried Jesse 1761-1848) from Plänitz in Brandenburg, Germany had 18 children with 2 wifes; 4 with the first and 14 with the second wife. I think that is the largest family I have in my family tree.

Other families, esp. in the area of the Harz in the 17th and 18th century had very often between 10 and 12 children.

Answer 3

Here we have a large group of men, all headed for the Yukon in 1898 to hopefully better their financial situation. Imagine all the thoughts going through their heads! Visions of the riches they will have when they hit a big gold strike? I wonder if it's the same as when people today buy a lottery ticket. :) Or, maybe some are merely escaping an untenable situation at home? That's my grandfather Clarence in the group going to join his older brother Grant who was already in Skagway waiting for him.They were following in the footsteps of their father Elisha, who came to California in 1850 to seek his fortune in gold. Here are a couple of surviving letters offering hints at what it was like when they got there. Neither of them found the wealth in gold that they imagined but gained a wealth of experience instead.. 

Comments

What wonderful letters! Thanks for sharing. My grandfather's Uncle Henry was also in the Yukon gold rush. He told my dad "I won and lost 2 fortunes." I get tired just reading about all the things they had to carry.

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Thanks Joyce! It is amazing to think of carrying all those things! BTW welcome to Wikitree, I hope you enjoy participating here and adding to the tree as much as I do!

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Great photo!

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Thank you for sharing this wonderful photo

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How do you get your links to match up with the right people? I am having much trouble with this. Any help would be much appreciated.

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I sent you a PM Joyce :) Hope this helps, if not let me know!

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Well, thank you for choosing my chosen ancestor Matthew Henson, and thanks for all your help figuring how to post things.

Answer 4

This is my grandfather Scott Marvin Sr. Not only was he a large man, standing over 6 feet tall with a 50 inch chest; he also came from a large family, as he was the 15th of his father's 16 children. He also had a large heart when caring for others. He served his country as a medic in WWI. My grandfather learned the oil field business in Pennsylvania, and he came to Oklahoma in 1914 to work the oil fields. He drilled wells in all the major oil fields throughout Oklahoma and Kansas, and he made sure that all of the men in my grandmother's large family had jobs, which proved to be a large change in all of their lives. This is a photo showing how much larger he is than my grand uncle and my great grandfather, and the second photo was carried in his son's wallet for 45 years.

Comments

Thank you, Alexis, for this story and photos about your grandfather.  He sounds like a wonderful person, and he has a lovely smile.

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Thank you Alexis for sharing the wonderful photos and story

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Thank you Robin I still remember living with him, even though I was only six.

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Alexis, great story & photo!

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Thank you Susan, from what I have been told, he was a wonderful father and his death was very hard for my mother and her brother.

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Thank you SJ for your comment.

Answer 5

MY LARGE FAMILY TREE

When you picture your family tree, you probably imagine a tree like a maple. "Me" is at the bottom, then going up the tree are "Mom" and "Dad", then "Grandma" and "Grandpa," and so on up. Or, if you are planning a reunion or a golden wedding, you can start with "Grandma" and "Grandpa" at the bottom, and on up to all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren nestled among the leaves.

When I picture my family tree, however, I picture a banyan tree. A banyan tree continues to grow by putting down roots and putting up branches until a single tree can cover an acre or more. My tree grows sideways as well as up. The story I submitted for "Solo" is about the great-grandmother of the wife of my half-second cousin. Other cousins are more distant but equally interesting: Lizzie Borden, Queen Victoria, Shelby Stanga the swamp logger. Chris Ferralolo, whose tales of his Italian family enliven these discussions, is a distant cousin on the French Canadian side. Another distant cousin is Alexis Nelson, whose "large" story appears just above this one.

Some banyan trees are considered sacred. I don't think mine is sacred. But, like your family tree, it is worthy of respect.

Answer 6

For last year's Scan-a-Thon I opened up the photo albums of my grandather.  He let me borrow them a while back to scan and then he passed away and I had procrastinated it until the SCaT.  What was a wonderful surprise was that due to my grandfather's pedantic nature, he put the names of everyone on the backs (or front) of the photos.  In the case of Aunt Olie, he only knew her husband as "Husband of Aunt Olie."  But either way, he was a huge man.  He looks in some of the photos like he is 7 foot tall.

Comments

What a absolutely wonderful photo cousin, what a treasure of a photo

Thank you for sharing

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The pictures in my family album have labels like "us at the beach" or "taken last Christmas."

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LOL - its how my Mom gives directions.  

Mom: when you get to Hendrix, go to 3rd street and turn right.  
Me: From which direction?
Mom: What?
Me: I turn right if I come to 3rd street from the north or the south?
Mom: It matters not, just turn right and you'll find it.

Me: opens Google maps...

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SJ, your Aunt Olie’s husband certainly does look does look like a very large man. Glad your grandfather’s albums have names on them.

Answer 7

I dont have any really large families on my side of the family tree. The biggest family that I have for now is 11 children from my paternal great grandparents.

The biggest family that I know of altogether is that of my Husbands Grandmother!! Her name was Elianne Jean

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Jean-559

She was married twice and had a total of 19 children!!

12 kids from the first marriage and 7 from the second!!

Comments

19 kids is big work!

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woah! I can't imagine!

Answer 8

My Uncle, John Allison Rammel (1922-1988) was a rather large man ... he was a photographer ... he spent his whole life working or running newspaper photography departments.

He started in Escanaba, Michigan as a youngster ... enter the army during WWII and got more photography training ... after the war we worked for the Decatur Journal ... Chicago Sun and Milwaukee Times.

He was a officer in the National Press Association ... he won numerous journalism awards for his photos.

His retirement party was large ... the cartoon the staff drew as an announcement was also a comical version of him as very large man.

This was in the mid-1980s.

Answer 9

The largest family in my ancestry that I know of is that of Ichabod West, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/West-8298, who had 24 children.  He was born in Rehoboth MA, in 1710, and had 12 children with his first wife, Sarah Wheaton.  They moved to the Beekman Patent near modern Pawling NY, where Sarah must have died before 1760.  He remarried a young woman named Abigail, and had 12 more children.  He died in his 70s, poor in money but rich in children and his love of God.  Many of his first family reached out to help the second family, providing them with a home and a chance to learn a trade.  My own grandmother was one of ten, and although this was much more recent in time, she explained that in her large family, each of the older children was responsible to be the special sibling for one of the younger ones. That is a secret of the success of some large families, true in the 1700s, and in the 1900s and beyond.

Answer 10

My second Great Grandfather came from a large family. He had 17 siblings.

Fred Garrow

Answer 11

In my case I'd say the Gurney family, who I'm descended from via my paternal grandmother. They aren't a "large" family in the sense that things don't go as far back as they do for other branches of my family (at least, not that I've discovered yet), but I have so many distant (3rd/4th) cousins on that side it's unbelievable.

The family traces back to 2 people, James Gurney and Martha Swain Jeary (and then the Jeary side goes a little bit further back but I haven't properly explored yet). Off memory, they had somewhere around 10 children. The eldest child was my ancestor, James Swain Gurney, and he had either 12 or 13 children.

I've been in the process of adding my Gurney cousins to my Ancestry tree (haven't even thought about WikiTree yet!) and it has been extremely time-consuming. I finally finished the branch of James Swain, and so far most of James Swain's siblings had a similar number of children (although I'm not finished yet, so I won't say they all did, and there were a few people who had around 5-8 children which is slightly less but still a lot). Keep in mind most these children also had quite a number of children and you can probably imagine things turn out very large.

There were also a number of Gurney cousin marriages, although none in my direct ancestral line. Quite interesting as I don't see many cousin marriages in my other branches and I don't believe it was a common thing for Surrey in the 1800s.

Answer 12

My 3-greats grandfather's surname was Large. John Large (Large-1246) was born about 1821-22 in London, England, and lived in St Giles in the Fields parish in the borough of Finsbury. He and his wife Mary Ann (born ca. 1818-19 in the British West Indies) had a daughter, Louisa Elizabeth (Large-1240) (born 9 June 1850 in London), who married my great-great-grandfather-to-be, Wm. Henry Hill (Hill-39127), on 10 Dec. 1870, in Toronto.

Comments

Which would make her name Louisa Large Hill.

Answer 13

Large. I've been spending some time on Ancestry lately, and trying to figure out how my large number of DNA matches connect to me. So I was playing with their "Thrulines" which sometimes use known ancestors but sometimes I'm not sure about their suggestions. It goes all the way to 5th great-grandparents -- there would be as many as 128 if you identified them all and there were no cousin marriages... but the ones that have the largest number of matches among my 5gg's are not on WikiTree yet. So going to my 4th great-grandparents, the couple credited with the largest number of DNA matches for me is George Pfennig and Mary Menchhofer. They would have been good candidates for last week's "Old Country" challenge too, because they came from Alsace, France (or sometimes classified as Prussia) and settled in Ohio. They had seven children and are responsible for 39 of my DNA matches on Ancestry. Whether that is accurate or not, I always take it as a good sign when there is a well-documented profile already here for someone I had on my own tree! Here's to a LARGE interconnected tree with lots and lots of cousins to discover!

Answer 14

Large family gettogethers are a great place to get genealogical information: https://allroadhaverhill.blogspot.com/2020/07/52-ancestors-week-31-large.html

How did they get started in my family's case?

Answer 15

For this week's 52 ancestors, I've chosen the LARGE number of Baldwin's who emigrated from Buckinghamshire, England to the colonies. These migrants include John, Henry, Sarah (Baldwin Lawrence), Syvester Jr., Anne (Baldwin) Bryan, John of Norwich, and more. There was such a number of descendants that there was a stained glass window donated by the Baldwin descendants to St Michael and All Angels in Aston Clinton, Bucks.

Comments

The Baldwin Genealogy 1881 is a good book to read before going to bed! My branch of Baldwins came to Michigan. Cyrus, born 1773 in Massachusetts, was a physician and lived in Baldwinsville, NY before he came to Genesee County to become its first doctor. There is a road named Baldwin Road in the area. He was my 3rd great-grandfather.

A distant relative was a governor of Michigan, Henry Porter. He has a town named after him.

Since the book is 2 inches thick and only goes to 1881, I agree that the Baldwin family is LARGE! I am from immigrant Henry’s line. Nice to meet you, cousin!

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Hi Kris, I own both original volumes. We have to be careful, though, because some of his information is not accurate. I try to find original sources, especially pre1600. While useful, they are not original sources. He even conflated the surnames of my 4x GGF's 1st and 2nd wives.

Answer 16

Working on my g-g-g-grandparents who had 11 children between 1856 and 1885 in Frivalt, Hungary

Answer 17

Week 31 - Large. Widdicombe-20.My ggg grandfather was well known in the Bellarine Peninusula of Victoria, for his early business from at least 1860, at this Portarlington Mills.

Back when buildings being built, were 1 or 2 story, this building was large, very large, at 4 stories. I'm sure other buildings being built for business purposes were large as well, but this is the only one that I know of in my family. And looking at how much timber and stone was brought in for this project, in an area where there weren't necessarily a lot, this project was huge.

Answer 18

Large to me means family. My great-great-grandfather had 21 children!

Answer 19

My grandparents, Edward B. Ceruti (Ceruti-2) and Lilian Constance Wark Ceruti (Wark-81) hatched a large plan while sitting in church. Edward passed a note to Lilian, "Will you marry me?" and Lilian wrote "yes" on the note and passed it back. Next, they embarked on a large journey on a not-so-large sailboat from Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas, to Key West Florida - and executed their large escape plan. This secret plan, once discovered, produced a large negative reaction from Lilian's mother, Rebecca Abascal Wark, an animosity that persisted for a large period of time. Then Edward and Lilian proceeded to raise a large family of 17 children. At the time of their deaths, the family had grown even larger, to include many grand children and their families. The profiles of some Ceruti cousins have yet to be added to WikiTree. You might say that they are still at large.

Comments

What a romantic story! That is the best proposal I ever heard of! And eloping by sailing 280 miles (I just looked it up) in a sailboat!

There doesn't seem to be a link to their full profiles?

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Thank you. You can go to my profile and follow the paternal line, or you can go directly using the following URLs.
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ceruti-2
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Wark-81

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Thanks, Marion,

I have been trying to figure out how to add links and pictures to my replies. This helped.

I am glad there was a "happily ever after." Thanks for sharing.

Answer 20

I have a slightly different perspective on this question... Taken from  Ellsworth Reporter, June 19, 1913  (photo posted on Hoch-395)

Largest Family in Kansas - Actual Weight

In the Sunday edition of the Topeka Capital appeared the following article, which will be of interest to the people of Ellsworth county, and especially to those in the western part where the Hoch family is so well known.  Accompanying the article was a picture of the family. Wilson boasts of the largest family in the state of Kansas in point of weight for the number of persons. It is the Hoch family, consisting of Frank Hoch sr. and his wife, five sons, and three daughters. The father tips the scales at 208 pounds.

The heaviest of the children is Mrs. Hoch Princ, who pulls down the scales at 298, while the lightweight of the family is one of the boys at 205 pounds. Each member of the family is large, but not abnormally fleshy. Each child born to the Hoch family is living, and not a one was ever sick a day sufficiently to go to bed, with the exception of the infantile ailments such as measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and mumps.

The entire family was reared on a farm. The father now owns about 800 acres of the best Ellsworth county land, and each of the children own from 160 to 600 acres, and they are independent in this world's goods.

 Each member of the family is a musician and some of them can play any kind of an instrument made to produce music. There was a time not many years ago when the Hoch family made one of the best orchestras in central Kansas, but it has been some time since they sold their services as musicians. They, however, are always willing to play for entertainments in a charitable way, and frequently furnish music for the entertainment of their friends, but no charge is made.  When it is announced that the Hoch family orchestra will furnish music for an entertainment the event is looked forward to with pleasure and they draw from all over the east part of Russell and the west part of Ellsworth counties.

Comments

Kansas has had some interesting things. This large family, Strippers (see the story under "Newsworthy"). A nude car wash. You can still see the world's largest ball of twine.