Saturday, November 17, 2007

My most prolific ancestor

John Newmark at the Transylvania Dutch blog has started his own "meme" - called "Can You Top This?" The idea is to find your ancestor with the most children in his or her family and try to top John's list of 22 children born to Samuel Van Every and his three wives.

The closest I can come is Zachariah Hildreth (1754-1828) of Townsend MA who had two very fecund wives. Unfortunately, his first wife died after 9 offspring and he married the 18-year old housekeeper soon after, who produced eight more children for randy old Zachariah. Only 17 - not even close to John's 22, but it's the best I can do.

John said he would give bonus points for a screen shot of the information in a software program. FamilyTreeMaker makes many good charts, but none that gets every person on one Windows screen in a decent size, except for the Outline Descendants Chart, as shown below.


Some of the graphic charts could get on one screen with the reduction of two landscape pages down to the screen width, but that would not be readable. FTM has nothing comparable to John's chart, apparently (I couldn't find it - can anybody help me out here?).

I am descended from son Zachariah Hildreth (1783-1857) who was the fourth child born to Elizabeth Keyes (1759-1793).

Of course, John's 22 children is just a "drop in the bucket" compared to the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco named Mulai Ismail (1646-1727), who reportedly fathered at least 867 children (see my post here). Thankfully, Mulai is NOT in my database!

How about your genealogy research? Do you have someone who has produced more than 22 children? If so, go tell John about it.

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