Question of the Week: What's the largest family you've found in your tree?

Question

What is the largest family group you've found in your genealogy research? Tell us about them with an answer below! You could also answer on Facebook or share the question image on your social media to get your family and friends talking.

Answer 1

My 4x great grandmother, [[Pierce-16405|Narcissa (Pierce) Hopson (1801-1860)]], was married about age 14 and had her first child at 15. Altogether, my 4th great grandparents had 14 children. All but one survived to adulthood.

Answer 2

According to their gravestone, my fourth great grandparents, Rodney and Tricy Bowlin, had 17 children. Yikes.

Answer 3

I think the largest I found in my tree is the Perley family. They were my 3rd Great Grandparents. They only had 13 children, but they are interesting and memorable because they had five children, then they added four sets of twins! Imagine their surprise! This family is also my closest to notable in my direct line. The father (and some of his sons) was an inventor. He invented an aerial bomber which, according to the PBS series NOVA, was the precursor to the drone. Most of his invention were related to ships.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Perley-93

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Mathews-1717

Answer 4

Fifteen children born to the same mother Elizabeth Kagarise (two different fathers) - the family included THREE sets of twins!  All fifteen children survived infancy and all but one made it to adulthood (the oldest died at about age 10 after the "hard winter" of 1880-1881 in South Dakota).  

Answer 5

I'm not too sure where your question is aimed, if it's nuclear families I've got at least 2 with over 20 children, one a great uncle who had 3 families, two at the same time, if it's extended families I have masses of 24th cousins and I think more distant, courtesy of my Norman ancestry and their "courtesy" visit to England in 1066, traces back to people born in 870, Orkney, Germanic/Nordic principalities, and bits that are now French, like anyone else with those connections my extended family is huge.

Answer 6

My 2nd grt. grandparents, Martin Floyd Hurst & Margaret Simpson, had 16 children. His wife was his first cousin. Martin's sister, 'Meda",(also 2nd grt. grandparent), married her first cousin, a Charley. Thus their parents, Nimrod & Mary (Pennington) Hurst, were my 3rd grt grandparents twice. My maternal family, married 1st cousins more than they ought.

Answer 7

My husbands grandmother. Eliana Jean

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

She was married twice and had 19 children altogether - 12 from the first marriage and 7 from the 2nd marriage.

One of those children from the first marriage was my father-in-law.

Comments

She needs to be awarded a lifetime achievement medal and a (U.S.) Silver Star (or its European equivalent). And, her DNA should have been studied for its hidden mysteries: recuperative powers and all that. She must have had an incredible constition.

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Would it help if I said that Eliana was married at age 16 and had her first child at age 17 and her last child at age 41. NO twins!!

Her first husband died in Feb 1945 and she was remarried less than 1 month later in March 1945.

The reason for the fast marriage was because both men had loved Eliana when she was younger. So she chose one to marry first, and then married the second bloke after the first one died. The second bloke had never married. He was willing to wait.

Ain't Love Grand??

Answer 8

If genetic connections count, then Wiesner-207 has something like 600 offspring — he was the husband of Mary Barton who ran a fertility clinic in London, and he was the source of much of the donor sperm used.
 

Comments

Sam, I think you have hit the nail on the head. This one takes the cake. Did any of these children know each other?

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They do now. A film was made of the siblings discovering each other.

Answer 9

Coster-812, Cornelis Koster and Antje Hoorns had 'only' 11 chidren during the 1820's and 1830's. But eight of them survived to get married.

Answer 10

My 6th great-grandfather, William B. Denmark, Jr., had about 20 children https://www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Denmark-271/300. While some of his children were being born, he was also having children with his wife’s sister.  After his wife died, he married the sister.  I descend from both sisters.

Comments

OK, I was tracking until the last sentence, "I descend from both sisters."  Only one of the sisters is your direct ancestor, right? The other is a many-times great aunt I would think.

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Here is my relationship back to his wife Mary: https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Relationship&action=calculate&person1Name=Moye-146&person2Name=Roberts-7085 and here is my relationship back to his wife’s sister Anna (his other wife): https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Relationship&action=calculate&person1Name=Moye-102&person2Name=Roberts-7085

Answer 11

I have found and sourced (but not added to Wiki tree yet !) 21 children from my husbands 2nd great Grandmother (Elsdon-2). The family story is that the family was known locally as 22 twice i.e. they had 22 children then one died, making 21 children, then another came along taking the family back to 22 children. So in total they Phoebe would have given birth to 23 children all from the same husband.

Unfortunately the evidence, like in most family stories, does not match the story, but I am still looking for the other 2 children in the records !

Answer 12

My great grandparents had 17. 2 died in infancy, unnamed.

The other 15 are listed on Wikitree.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Brown-47047

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hunt-9569

Answer 13

My great grandmother had 16 children. One with her first husband and 15 with her second. Most lived to adulthood.

Answer 14

The largest family group I have found is my 4x great aunt Rebecca Lawson and her husband Joseph Drage who had 16 children between 1865 and 1889.

Answer 15

Perhaps the all-time heavyweight in this category was Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco. His children allegedly number nearly 900 (!!!) and even presuming that is a big overstatement, the man had approximately 80 wives and concubines. If he had only 3 children by each, which is not impossible, that's 280-some-odd children.

Comments

I’m looking forward to someday seeing his WikiTree profile ;-)

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One of his wives, known by her Moroccan name Lalla Bilqis (Betsy??) was an Englishwoman who'd been captured at sea by barbary pirates. Perhaps some research could be done to establish her identity and allow us to connect Moulay Ismail to the Tree!

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Not wanting to be sexist about this but I often think that fathering a child only takes a few minutes whereas mothering one takes a lifetime.

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One would hope it took more than a few minutes...!

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Yes indeed!  I was being a little facetious, of course.

Answer 16

Generationally, probably the Dalton's. They are to genealogy what a run-on sentence is to a 5 paragraph essay/

Answer 17

The family of Paolo Coppola is still the reigning champion of large families. Paolo was the brother of my 2nd great-grandmother, Caterina. 

Not only did he have 16 kids, he had two girls with the same name who were half sisters. They were both named Mary Rose and lived very long lives. Here's Mary Rose one: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Coppola-268

Mary Rose two: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Coppola-218

I wonder if they alternated the use of the name because sometimes they'd be called Rose Mary. Maybe they alternated every other day or something.

Answer 18

According to the newspaper, my 3rd-great-uncle & aunt had 21 children. I haven't found records for all of them - that number may include some infants who died very young; also records soon after they migrated to the colony may not be complete.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Neale-1333

Answer 19

I come from a family of 18 children, all from the same parents. We were all born within 24 years of each other. Eleven were born in Moose Creek Ontario and the other seven in Cornwall Ontario. I remember the VN nurse and my grandmother coming over to our house when my mother was about to deliver. Only the last of the siblings was born in a hospital.

Comments

Wow! Are all of your siblings still living?

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I'm going to stop at WOW!

Answer 20

My 5x great-grandparents Mathurin and Jeanne (Chaboussant) Gastineau, who were Huguenot refugees, married in London and had 18 children.  Their descendants did lots of interesting things and had some notable connections.  I have seen a reference to Mathurin being a silk weaver.  I watched a TV programme last night with Jay Blades exploring the East End of London and part of it was about the Huguenot silk weavers: https://www.channel5.com/show/jay-blades-east-end-through-time/season-1/episode-1

Comments

My longest family so far is Calhoun up to Many Irish nobility and Scottish nobility. Up through The Stewart family. Much family has been researched by my Cousin and Family search.