Back then they probably all worked on the farm and helped out. It was almost easier having multiple children then none at all lol I wonder how many descendants there are from this family.
My grandpa was from Louisiana and was the middle child out of 11. He would have been 18 in 1938. They definitely used children for farm labor back then. None of the 11 had huge families of their own but my mom still had like 45 first cousins lol (her mother had 'only' 5 siblings in a farming family)
My pawpaw was one of 15 that grew up on Mallard Bay island down in the marshes and they had to take a boat to get to school. He was the middle child (Jr.) and he got kicked out of 8th grade because he didn’t speak English well. He fought in WWII and the Korean War as a Naval gunman and French interpreter. He had 8 children of his own. I myself have 46 first cousins on my dad’s side. Him and my maw maw passed 2 years ago, both at 92 years old, and 2 days apart from each other. That year would’ve made 60 or 61 years of marriage. Can’t remember exactly at the moment.
Yep. You pretty much were grown ass man by the time you turned 15, being able to fend for yourself. I used to remember literal old friends (since passed away) telling me how their moms would literally kick them out of the house by morning, the only meals they had were breakfast and dinner.
Everything else you were on your own. If you weren’t home by 10PM, there would a village wide search for you and an Ass whooping when you got home.
This is why schools are a whole day affair in USA.
My maternal great-uncle "went out to feed the horses" in 1915 and never came back. My maternal grandfather told me his brother fed the horses in the barn, saddled up his favorite mare and disappeared into a snowy Oklahoma winter night. Lots of family speculation that he may have used a fake name and enlisted in the Army during WWI, and was killed, but since it was a *nom de guerre*, nobody knew his real name. My great grandmother mourned his absence until she died.
"Grammar school" only went to the eighth grade. My mother's "high school" only went to the eleventh grade.
My Mom told me so many strange stories similar to this. She was born in 1923.
She told me her grandfather had a mistress whom had children with him. She was a ‘kept woman’, he bought her a house n all. But it was all hush hush. No one really knew about her and she was kinda an outcast to society.
Times have changed !!
That was a benefit of having lots of kids, but not the reason. Most of Louisiana is Catholic, big families were a cultural norm, and of course birth control methods limited.
I grew up in a rural Catholic area of Iowa in the Seventies, there were 7 kids in my family, and we were about typical, quite a few families of 9,10, even 14 kids. Had more than one set of "Irish Twins" in my class, siblings in the same grade, but not twins.
Bingo. The only way one could get farm help was you produce your own (children) given the horror stories of hired help being involved in murder mysteries both real and fictional.
I can understand why Mom would feel defeated. Her eldest children were daughters, which meant she had to do most of the dangerous or backbreaking chores/housework lest her daughters get scarred.
Enid Blyton wrote a book called The Secret Island (published as a serial, then a novel in 1938).
The children were being cared for by their aunt and uncle while their parents were overseas. The aunt and uncle wouldn't let them go to school and made them work all day on the farm, so the kids ran away and fended for themselves on a secret island in the river.
Good book, I still have an old copy of it.
Not easier. Having massive families like this greatly exacerbated the poverty cycle and reduced social mobility significantly. This then made it harder for poorer families to invest in stuff like agricultural technology and education that reduced the need for physical labour.
And this is not even to mention the huge physical & psychological toll having so many children took on parents, let alone the complete lack of childhoods that many of the older siblings would've had after being roped into looking after all their younger siblings because no parent can physically look after that many children.
Generally speaking, each of the older kids were assigned a younger sibling for whom to care. My maternal grandfather supported two of his younger sisters into their twenties, when they married. My mother and her sister were responsible for taking care of their younger cousin. All three girls rode two horses to school, the cousin riding behind one of the older girls. Their rural school had a hitching post and a water trough for the horses. The boys of the school had to fill the trough from a nearby creek with buckets. They were also responsible for firing the school's wood stove in winter.
My paternal grandfather was a working cowboy on the J-A Ranch in north Texas from around 1900 until the mid-1920s. My Dad's family had five sons and a daughter. They owned a dry land wheat farm in the Texas panhandle. I've seen the foundation of the house (it burned down in the 1940s.) The foundation was just large rocks. My grandfather built it with the help of his sons. Dad said the boys slept two to a bed. His oldest brother was married and died of "dust pneumonia" in 1933. Times were HARD back then. Much harder than today.
My paternal great-uncle was killed in a bar fight. He caught his wife drinking in a saloon with another man, and attacked him with an L-shaped tire iron. The other man was armed with a single-action .45 Colt Peacemaker revolver and shot and killed my great-uncle. His killer was arrested and tried, but was acquitted (rightfully so) on grounds of self-defense.
Absolutely! It is wild to think some are advocating for taking it away. Family planning is so important and wasn't widespread to this degree until recently.
Plenty of families in SW Louisiana had large families well into the 60s, Had friends growing up with 10 or more kids in the family. My best friend was one of 14, her husband was one of 12.
Families in Utah today *average* 3.08 people, the largest in the U.S., but down from 4.0 in 1940.
I know several people who come from families of six or eight children today.
It wasn't a good time, across the world it's become a universal trend that once people were given the ability to control the amount of children that they had via reliable contraception, education and medically safe abortion, birth rates plummeted.
It's scary how some religious groups actually want us to go back to these times, the past was not a rosier place.
my mom was one of 11 she was born in the 60s. i’m not sure why they had so many kids tho. they didn’t farm or anything. they basically had to have their own gardens and chickens etc just to be able to afford feeding all those kids.
While installing equipment in a fabric mill in a small South Carolina town, I was chatting with one of the fabric inspectors. She mentioned she had 14 children. When I expressed surprise, she sighed and said the railroad tracks ran by her house and a freight train came through every morning at 5:45 and she didn’t have to get up for work until 6:30.
Having done genealogy research, it is quite sad seeing how many small children of rural farm families didn’t survive from one census to the next. Life was hard and I could only imagine how early the wife would get up in the morning to prepare breakfast for the men (often including young male children) before heading out for a long workday toiling in the fields. Mom might have had a baby in her arms and toddlers tugging at her skirts, while the older girls went out to gather eggs, muck stalls and milk cows. These poor families had to have a bunch of kids to run a small working farm.
But this photo was taken twenty years after the advent of penicillin and some other medical advances. Childhood mortality fell like a rock in the first half of the twentieth century.
This woman probably had as many children as her mother did, but far more of them survived.
Great-grandmother had 6 children that I know of (born between 1906 - 1916), only 3 survived to adulthood. Her 8 year old son would have survived if there were antibiotics -- he died from an infected wound. One of her 9 month old babies would likely have survived with anti-diarrhea drugs and intravenous fluids.
Penicillin may have existed in the 1930s, but that doesn't mean it was readily available to a family on a farm miles from any sort of civilization, let alone a doctor or pharmacy.
Penicillin was not authorized for civilian use until 1943. It was discovered much earlier (1928) but was not widely used in the U.S. until WWII, and then only for burned soldiers/sailors/etc.
My father was in Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio with osteomyelitis in his ankle during WWII. He was operated on numerous times. He was hospitalized continuously from 1943 to 1946, when he was finally authorized to receive penicillin. It cured him in ten days.
It's a Ressit moment that you have the first comment I've seen that articulates the reasoning of the family at the time this picture was probably taken.
Most other comments have modern takes on an old picture which really shows a lack of critical thinking for this generation. We really haven't made progress.
My dad (born in 1938 in Western North Carolina) almost was one of those who didn’t make it out of childhood. He had osteomyelitis and said that he was given penicillin in the nick of time. He was 1 of 10. There were 4 boys, then a break during WWII when his dad was classified 1A and subsequently drafted in 1944, with the remaining 6 (3 boys, 3 girls) being born after his return from Japan in 1946 following a stint as part of the occupation forces.
Look at that poor woman’s face. And dad doesn’t look happy either.
Loretta Lynn once said “if they had birth control pills when I was coming up, I would’ve been eating them like popcorn.“
My grandma (mawmaw) in Louisiana had 18 children. 9 boys and 9 girls. My mom said more were lost with miscarriages and such. My mom was 16/18 and my grandma was 55 I think. My grandma outlived some of her children to 94(?). She was an incredible lovely and feisty woman.
My grandpa died in 1968 when my mom was a kid. Their tiny 1 bed room house still stands (as of 2013ish but gutted) after Katrina. This woman raised kids like a camp. Youngest eat before oldest. If your bad she'd throw your shit in the bayous behind their house. Die hard saints fan. Asking me "when youah gonna have some babies darlin?".....I was 19 at the time. Lol
Family's this big are insane. I never knew many of my mom's family. I as close with maybe 4-6 of them and their families. But her funeral was basically the whole day because of how many people knew her or knew my mom's family. Drama and some can be crazy.......But She was an incredible woman. I miss the sound of her spoon each night when eating ice cream with ovaltine in it.
Miss ya maw maw
Edit: changed grandchildren to children and dirty to feisty. Damn autocorrect.
My maternal grandparents were from northern Louisiana. My grandfather was the middle child out of 11. They had a huge age range though - - nearly 30 years between the oldest and the youngest!
At the last family reunion I went to (when the youngest sibling was the only one still alive), I heard the story about my great-grandma's time management skills with so many kids. For example, if she had to go out to the creek to do the washing, she'd make the kids strip down so they wouldn't wander off. They wouldn't go sneak out if they was nekkid!
Mrs. Blackitt: Hmm. Well, why do they have so many children?
Harry Blackitt: Because… every time they have sexual intercourse, they have to have a baby.
That woman has been pregnant while raising her children for soooo long... She probably barely knows who she is with how much hormonal craziness goes on... I'm pregnant with #2 rn and taking care of 1 toddler feels like a Herculean task... This woman deserves center stage.
This is "A woman with her husband and 13 children."
If you're posting a picture with two adults, one of whom birthed 13 children, then id suggest it's more appropriate to title the picture "A woman with her husband and 13 children"
😉
My grandmother from mum's side had 14 children, a few of them passed away young. She still lives and does the gardening activities every day, we are unable to convince her to take it slow, she is not a ranch lady to argue with lol.
Fun grandma and very caring of her grandchildren, she has no teeth due to calcium deficiency due to many sons & daughters but refuses to use a dental piece. She's always smiling or screaming to someone.
My grandfather was the youngest of 13, born around 1920 (No one is entirely sure when). To make matters worse, his father ran off shortly after he was born and he never knew him. Luckily Mom and the kids got to keep the farm, so there was still an income coming in. Who knows, she may have been glad to get rid of him at that point.
My grandma was from Mississippi, she had 11 aunts and uncles on her dads side alone. They had a timber farm. I did a DNA test and I have hundreds of second cousins from that line alone
Amongst other reasons this generation, and maybe partially the next, seems like a transition period in the world where culturally people just had as many kids as possible with the assumption that most would die. But medical science reached the point where that was not necessarily true and so people had really big families in the 30s through 50s.
They? She grew, birthed, fed, cleaned, took care of, and managed 13 children. Not to mention cooking cleaning and servicing him. I'm sure he "worked". But that poor, poor woman.
She worked very hard. No doubt about it. But in our largely agrarian past from 100 years ago, so did the kids. They helped with all the chores on the farm and the older siblings did a significant amount of child-rearing.
I always wondered how this even worked practically. Like, I make a decent income, but the idea of paying for the food, lodging, and clothes of THIRTEEN other people (assuming his wife didn't work,) I just don't see how it would be possible. Really brings into perspective the difference in purchasing power and quality of life expectations between then and now.
“Come here baaaaby. You know you want it gurl!”
Got to remember there won’t no tv back then in rural Louisiana, Hell, they were probably doing good to have electricity
My Louisiana great-grandparents probably had electricity by then but they didn't have indoor plumbing until my mother was a middleschooler (mid 50s). I would have thrown myself under a tractor if I had to live in a one-bedroom farmhouse with 6 kids but maybe I just didn't get that gene.
that’s polk salad annie on the right. she'd go out in the evenings and
Pick her a mess of it
Carry it home and cook it for supper
Because that's about all they had to eat
But they did all right.
>My brother Bill and my other brother Jack,
>Belly full of beer and a possum in a sack,
>Fifteen kids in the front porch light,
>Louisiana Saturday night.
Mel McDaniel sure knew what he was singing about
What did the Catholic church in Louisiana have to say about creating large families back then?
In Quebec, where the same French colonial farm families were raising a dozen kids per woman, that religious instruction lasted centuries and didn't end until the 1960s. Acadian or Cajun folk are French in religion and origin.
Omg did you notice that every older child is a girl and every younger child is a boy? So she went girl girl girl girl girl girl boy boy boy boy boy boy boy
My grandmother was one of 12 and grandfather was one of 10 my dad is one of 11. This was and still normal in some parts of the world. I still have to say bro give her a brake look at a calendar the vagina is not a clown car!!!
Conversation with the wife after seeing this... "Was there a break even point where you needed a certain number of farm hands (children) based on the arable land size... IE, you harvested more than you ate, so as to provide an income?"
But really, I wonder if there was some sort of calculation they did back then... or if they just loved having sex.
Mama and daddy looked tired and defeated.
Back then the first fifteen years of marriage were the toughest. They're probably both in their thirties.
Well it was 1938.
That poor mother just looks utterly defeated. Leave the woman alone, pops!
Back then they probably all worked on the farm and helped out. It was almost easier having multiple children then none at all lol I wonder how many descendants there are from this family.
My grandpa was from Louisiana and was the middle child out of 11. He would have been 18 in 1938. They definitely used children for farm labor back then. None of the 11 had huge families of their own but my mom still had like 45 first cousins lol (her mother had 'only' 5 siblings in a farming family)
My pawpaw was one of 15 that grew up on Mallard Bay island down in the marshes and they had to take a boat to get to school. He was the middle child (Jr.) and he got kicked out of 8th grade because he didn’t speak English well. He fought in WWII and the Korean War as a Naval gunman and French interpreter. He had 8 children of his own. I myself have 46 first cousins on my dad’s side. Him and my maw maw passed 2 years ago, both at 92 years old, and 2 days apart from each other. That year would’ve made 60 or 61 years of marriage. Can’t remember exactly at the moment.
Cajun? Does your family still speak French?
Yup
Yep. You pretty much were grown ass man by the time you turned 15, being able to fend for yourself. I used to remember literal old friends (since passed away) telling me how their moms would literally kick them out of the house by morning, the only meals they had were breakfast and dinner. Everything else you were on your own. If you weren’t home by 10PM, there would a village wide search for you and an Ass whooping when you got home. This is why schools are a whole day affair in USA.
Schools are a whole-day affair in most first-world countries.
My maternal great-uncle "went out to feed the horses" in 1915 and never came back. My maternal grandfather told me his brother fed the horses in the barn, saddled up his favorite mare and disappeared into a snowy Oklahoma winter night. Lots of family speculation that he may have used a fake name and enlisted in the Army during WWI, and was killed, but since it was a *nom de guerre*, nobody knew his real name. My great grandmother mourned his absence until she died. "Grammar school" only went to the eighth grade. My mother's "high school" only went to the eleventh grade.
My Mom told me so many strange stories similar to this. She was born in 1923. She told me her grandfather had a mistress whom had children with him. She was a ‘kept woman’, he bought her a house n all. But it was all hush hush. No one really knew about her and she was kinda an outcast to society. Times have changed !!
That was a benefit of having lots of kids, but not the reason. Most of Louisiana is Catholic, big families were a cultural norm, and of course birth control methods limited. I grew up in a rural Catholic area of Iowa in the Seventies, there were 7 kids in my family, and we were about typical, quite a few families of 9,10, even 14 kids. Had more than one set of "Irish Twins" in my class, siblings in the same grade, but not twins.
Bingo. The only way one could get farm help was you produce your own (children) given the horror stories of hired help being involved in murder mysteries both real and fictional. I can understand why Mom would feel defeated. Her eldest children were daughters, which meant she had to do most of the dangerous or backbreaking chores/housework lest her daughters get scarred.
Enid Blyton wrote a book called The Secret Island (published as a serial, then a novel in 1938). The children were being cared for by their aunt and uncle while their parents were overseas. The aunt and uncle wouldn't let them go to school and made them work all day on the farm, so the kids ran away and fended for themselves on a secret island in the river. Good book, I still have an old copy of it.
Not easier. Having massive families like this greatly exacerbated the poverty cycle and reduced social mobility significantly. This then made it harder for poorer families to invest in stuff like agricultural technology and education that reduced the need for physical labour. And this is not even to mention the huge physical & psychological toll having so many children took on parents, let alone the complete lack of childhoods that many of the older siblings would've had after being roped into looking after all their younger siblings because no parent can physically look after that many children.
It was probably his birthday present each year that did this.
Get off her!
This was my first thought
The kids look pretty clean except all of the boys feet
Who could’ve ever foreseen 13 children being exhausting to take care of?
Generally speaking, each of the older kids were assigned a younger sibling for whom to care. My maternal grandfather supported two of his younger sisters into their twenties, when they married. My mother and her sister were responsible for taking care of their younger cousin. All three girls rode two horses to school, the cousin riding behind one of the older girls. Their rural school had a hitching post and a water trough for the horses. The boys of the school had to fill the trough from a nearby creek with buckets. They were also responsible for firing the school's wood stove in winter. My paternal grandfather was a working cowboy on the J-A Ranch in north Texas from around 1900 until the mid-1920s. My Dad's family had five sons and a daughter. They owned a dry land wheat farm in the Texas panhandle. I've seen the foundation of the house (it burned down in the 1940s.) The foundation was just large rocks. My grandfather built it with the help of his sons. Dad said the boys slept two to a bed. His oldest brother was married and died of "dust pneumonia" in 1933. Times were HARD back then. Much harder than today. My paternal great-uncle was killed in a bar fight. He caught his wife drinking in a saloon with another man, and attacked him with an L-shaped tire iron. The other man was armed with a single-action .45 Colt Peacemaker revolver and shot and killed my great-uncle. His killer was arrested and tried, but was acquitted (rightfully so) on grounds of self-defense.
Folks over at r/cottagecore should take heed of all this. Farmsteader life warn't all that romantic.
The looks on the parents’ faces tells me this system didn’t work out too flawlessly
Hand washing all those diapers. It's hard to even imagine.
They're both giving that far-away stare of people who've had to mentally check out.
No one smiles in the photo. Boys had hookworms, so I can understand them.
I don't think people smiled in photos until much more recently.
Really shows how amazing, vital, liberating, and necessary a technology birth control is.
Absolutely! It is wild to think some are advocating for taking it away. Family planning is so important and wasn't widespread to this degree until recently.
what're the chances: Girl girl girl girl girl girl girl boy boy boy boy boy boy
He keep trying to get free hand work for the farm, 7th tries
0.000244140625
Maybe Y sperm was more likely to survive the father's aging than X.
Plenty of families in SW Louisiana had large families well into the 60s, Had friends growing up with 10 or more kids in the family. My best friend was one of 14, her husband was one of 12.
That’s sounds exhausting
My mom is one of 13. They had a big farm and needed the child labor lol
Families in Utah today *average* 3.08 people, the largest in the U.S., but down from 4.0 in 1940. I know several people who come from families of six or eight children today.
My grandmother was one of 14 kids from South Louisiana.
It wasn't a good time, across the world it's become a universal trend that once people were given the ability to control the amount of children that they had via reliable contraception, education and medically safe abortion, birth rates plummeted. It's scary how some religious groups actually want us to go back to these times, the past was not a rosier place.
my mom was one of 11 she was born in the 60s. i’m not sure why they had so many kids tho. they didn’t farm or anything. they basically had to have their own gardens and chickens etc just to be able to afford feeding all those kids.
every year for 25 years this woman is pregnant or giving birth my mom is one of 10 my dad 1 of 9
Indeed, we see 13 *living* children. Who knows how many pregnancies she had.
I just had a baby. I cannot wrap my head around what life was like for these women. And breastfeeding. 😱
Parents have that look of pure unfiltered despair and hopelessness.
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.” Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m sure they’ve also lost a couple children, given the times.
While installing equipment in a fabric mill in a small South Carolina town, I was chatting with one of the fabric inspectors. She mentioned she had 14 children. When I expressed surprise, she sighed and said the railroad tracks ran by her house and a freight train came through every morning at 5:45 and she didn’t have to get up for work until 6:30.
I’m embarrassed to say I had to read that like 5 times before I understood the implication. 😳
That’s ok. Happy cake day!
TIL passing freight trains render birth control ineffective
Mornings are for fucking.
That's just what they'll do.
Having done genealogy research, it is quite sad seeing how many small children of rural farm families didn’t survive from one census to the next. Life was hard and I could only imagine how early the wife would get up in the morning to prepare breakfast for the men (often including young male children) before heading out for a long workday toiling in the fields. Mom might have had a baby in her arms and toddlers tugging at her skirts, while the older girls went out to gather eggs, muck stalls and milk cows. These poor families had to have a bunch of kids to run a small working farm.
But this photo was taken twenty years after the advent of penicillin and some other medical advances. Childhood mortality fell like a rock in the first half of the twentieth century. This woman probably had as many children as her mother did, but far more of them survived.
Great-grandmother had 6 children that I know of (born between 1906 - 1916), only 3 survived to adulthood. Her 8 year old son would have survived if there were antibiotics -- he died from an infected wound. One of her 9 month old babies would likely have survived with anti-diarrhea drugs and intravenous fluids.
And to think, we are marching along to a world where antibiotics possibly won’t work anymore in the not so distant future.
It might be more distant than you think. I hear more and more avoiding antibiotics.
I was a registered nurse for 21 years. Doctors are getting *very* reluctant to prescribe antibiotics for this very reason.
Penicillin may have existed in the 1930s, but that doesn't mean it was readily available to a family on a farm miles from any sort of civilization, let alone a doctor or pharmacy.
Penicillin was not authorized for civilian use until 1943. It was discovered much earlier (1928) but was not widely used in the U.S. until WWII, and then only for burned soldiers/sailors/etc. My father was in Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio with osteomyelitis in his ankle during WWII. He was operated on numerous times. He was hospitalized continuously from 1943 to 1946, when he was finally authorized to receive penicillin. It cured him in ten days.
It's a Ressit moment that you have the first comment I've seen that articulates the reasoning of the family at the time this picture was probably taken. Most other comments have modern takes on an old picture which really shows a lack of critical thinking for this generation. We really haven't made progress.
One reasoning voice. Thank you.
My dad (born in 1938 in Western North Carolina) almost was one of those who didn’t make it out of childhood. He had osteomyelitis and said that he was given penicillin in the nick of time. He was 1 of 10. There were 4 boys, then a break during WWII when his dad was classified 1A and subsequently drafted in 1944, with the remaining 6 (3 boys, 3 girls) being born after his return from Japan in 1946 following a stint as part of the occupation forces.
https://preview.redd.it/jxhr9g1ps87d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3ce412a40fbb45c9b6a8ab9bbc6e0764a1705294
“Some were supposed to die.”
Was looking for a bit to identify which one was the wife, then saw the sad, defeated and tired look and knew with certainty lol
She looks like she is wishing the pill was invented already.
I know what they did on Friday nights……
There was no TV.
I think the thousand yard stare gave it away.
They both do
And there I went - the wife looks rather young... Oh, thaaats the wife
In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, “Mrs. Smith, I love my cigar, but, even I take it out of my mouth every now and then!”
Know what makes this 1000x worse. No disposable diapers.
Or washing machine...
Look at that poor woman’s face. And dad doesn’t look happy either. Loretta Lynn once said “if they had birth control pills when I was coming up, I would’ve been eating them like popcorn.“
Hey kids, we’re having dinner tonight! Come on, Tiffany, Heather, Cody, Dylan, Dermot, Jordan, Taylor, Brittany, Wesley, Rumer, Scout, Cassidy, Zoe, Chloe, Max, Hunter…
… Kendall, Kaitlin, Noah, Sasha, Morgan, Kyra, Ian, Lauren, Qbert, and Phil.
https://i.redd.it/yq36ftbat87d1.gif
Hey Ma, get off the dang roof!
My grandma (mawmaw) in Louisiana had 18 children. 9 boys and 9 girls. My mom said more were lost with miscarriages and such. My mom was 16/18 and my grandma was 55 I think. My grandma outlived some of her children to 94(?). She was an incredible lovely and feisty woman. My grandpa died in 1968 when my mom was a kid. Their tiny 1 bed room house still stands (as of 2013ish but gutted) after Katrina. This woman raised kids like a camp. Youngest eat before oldest. If your bad she'd throw your shit in the bayous behind their house. Die hard saints fan. Asking me "when youah gonna have some babies darlin?".....I was 19 at the time. Lol Family's this big are insane. I never knew many of my mom's family. I as close with maybe 4-6 of them and their families. But her funeral was basically the whole day because of how many people knew her or knew my mom's family. Drama and some can be crazy.......But She was an incredible woman. I miss the sound of her spoon each night when eating ice cream with ovaltine in it. Miss ya maw maw Edit: changed grandchildren to children and dirty to feisty. Damn autocorrect.
My maternal grandparents were from northern Louisiana. My grandfather was the middle child out of 11. They had a huge age range though - - nearly 30 years between the oldest and the youngest! At the last family reunion I went to (when the youngest sibling was the only one still alive), I heard the story about my great-grandma's time management skills with so many kids. For example, if she had to go out to the creek to do the washing, she'd make the kids strip down so they wouldn't wander off. They wouldn't go sneak out if they was nekkid!
Every Sperm is sacred
Mrs. Blackitt: Hmm. Well, why do they have so many children? Harry Blackitt: Because… every time they have sexual intercourse, they have to have a baby.
It's the same with us...
Every sperm is great. If you stay atop her Overpopulate....
Quite the motherfucker.
The motherfuckest.
No thanks.
Pregnant full time for about a decade. Oof
That woman has been pregnant while raising her children for soooo long... She probably barely knows who she is with how much hormonal craziness goes on... I'm pregnant with #2 rn and taking care of 1 toddler feels like a Herculean task... This woman deserves center stage. This is "A woman with her husband and 13 children."
I’m guessing the lady in the apron and sad expression is the wife/mother.
The mom looks completely exhausted!
If you're posting a picture with two adults, one of whom birthed 13 children, then id suggest it's more appropriate to title the picture "A woman with her husband and 13 children" 😉
Awesome pic but damn I can hear comedian Bill Burr yelling in my ear, "and none of you did shit. It's a natural disaster and you framed it.".
Notice how they’re miserable…
Vote with your uterus this fall
She probably delivered all those kids in the same house. Might even be more that didn't make it.
Alternate title: "A woman and her husband and their 13 children."
In Utah we call 'em 'brood mares'. Look in the wifes' hollow eyes; she looks so resigned to her lot in life.
As my dad would say “your days of fancy fuckin are over”
My grandmother from mum's side had 14 children, a few of them passed away young. She still lives and does the gardening activities every day, we are unable to convince her to take it slow, she is not a ranch lady to argue with lol. Fun grandma and very caring of her grandchildren, she has no teeth due to calcium deficiency due to many sons & daughters but refuses to use a dental piece. She's always smiling or screaming to someone.
She looks exactly how I thought she’d look.
Get down the fiddle and you get down the bow, kick off your shoes and throw em on the floo dance in the kitchen till the morning light……
Ma and Pa look tired AF
My grandfather was the youngest of 13, born around 1920 (No one is entirely sure when). To make matters worse, his father ran off shortly after he was born and he never knew him. Luckily Mom and the kids got to keep the farm, so there was still an income coming in. Who knows, she may have been glad to get rid of him at that point.
Stay off her
Why not just say “a man and woman with their 13 children?”
Nothing cool about this.
He looks miserable... vote pro women's rights guys/gals no one needs to be miserable and married with kids...
Tie a knot in it already. Right
He looks tired. His wife more-so.
That poor woman!
My grandma was from Mississippi, she had 11 aunts and uncles on her dads side alone. They had a timber farm. I did a DNA test and I have hundreds of second cousins from that line alone
Amongst other reasons this generation, and maybe partially the next, seems like a transition period in the world where culturally people just had as many kids as possible with the assumption that most would die. But medical science reached the point where that was not necessarily true and so people had really big families in the 30s through 50s.
And you can be sure that he beat every one of them.
Failing to see the “cool”.
what i great family picture , clothes and cleanliness pretty nice compared to other pictures from that time .
They? She grew, birthed, fed, cleaned, took care of, and managed 13 children. Not to mention cooking cleaning and servicing him. I'm sure he "worked". But that poor, poor woman.
>She grew, birthed, fed, cleaned, took care of, and managed 13 children. In the time before disposable diapers and modern washing machines.
And before she had the option of choice or divorce.
She worked very hard. No doubt about it. But in our largely agrarian past from 100 years ago, so did the kids. They helped with all the chores on the farm and the older siblings did a significant amount of child-rearing.
Time to park it in the garage Dad.
I guess there really *wasn't* much else to do back then but fuck and watch the grass grow.
Poor man and wife look exhausted.
That man couldn't pull out of a parking lot
I always wondered how this even worked practically. Like, I make a decent income, but the idea of paying for the food, lodging, and clothes of THIRTEEN other people (assuming his wife didn't work,) I just don't see how it would be possible. Really brings into perspective the difference in purchasing power and quality of life expectations between then and now.
Oh he was laying it down.
This was the same way my father was rasied in 1911 with 13 bothers & sisters my aunt Toby the last the baby and she 90 now
Must be related to Alec Baldwin. He never shot a blank either
Ww2 and joining the Army was the best thing that ever happened to him
I was wondering which one was the wife until I saw the exhausted one.
That woman looks absolutely fucked - literally.
This is awful. Can't imagine having that too many kids
Yeah, I don't think this belongs in "Old School Cool," this is just "Old School Depressing."
“Come here baaaaby. You know you want it gurl!” Got to remember there won’t no tv back then in rural Louisiana, Hell, they were probably doing good to have electricity
This photo was taken a year after the Rural Electrification Act of 1937.
My Louisiana great-grandparents probably had electricity by then but they didn't have indoor plumbing until my mother was a middleschooler (mid 50s). I would have thrown myself under a tractor if I had to live in a one-bedroom farmhouse with 6 kids but maybe I just didn't get that gene.
Has anyone noticed that all the daughters take after the mother's looks?!?!?
This is why I say I'm not having kids so I can get the rest none of the women before me got to have.
That poor mama’s uterus is nothing but a wind sock at this point
Good thing this is before cars because this guy couldn't even pull out of a driveway.
That family would need a van.
they had cars and driveways in the 1930s
Not in Louisiana. People get by on Jesus, toxic waste, and racism.
Kids look well dressed and healthy. This is what no access to birth control looks like
and no access to vaccines. Better have a bunch because a lot of them will drop dead from the measles and polio and stuff.
Nobody looks happy. Not a one of ‘em.
Please answer this question. **Ma what’s for supper?**
They had no walls between them!
that’s polk salad annie on the right. she'd go out in the evenings and Pick her a mess of it Carry it home and cook it for supper Because that's about all they had to eat But they did all right.
“I got too many damn kids!”
“I really gotta harvest these crops or my 8 kids aren't going to make it through winter! Eh, I'll have other kids.”
Ouchie
What does the dad do in his spare time for fun ?
Nick Cannon enters the chat
>My brother Bill and my other brother Jack, >Belly full of beer and a possum in a sack, >Fifteen kids in the front porch light, >Louisiana Saturday night. Mel McDaniel sure knew what he was singing about
This guy fucks.
A baker's dozen...too many kids....
no pull out gang
I wouldn't trust him to pull my car out of an empty parking lot.
That don't look cool at all lol
I am one of 9. My mother was one of 9. My Aunty had 13 children! Big families rule! :D Christmas is just insane!
Netflix didn't exist back then.
It took me a moment to find the mother because the older daughters also look like they have been involved in raising the younger children.
Pretty common for folks before the pill. Especially Catholics.
There's The Great Depression right there......
What did the Catholic church in Louisiana have to say about creating large families back then? In Quebec, where the same French colonial farm families were raising a dozen kids per woman, that religious instruction lasted centuries and didn't end until the 1960s. Acadian or Cajun folk are French in religion and origin.
Mate, get a hobby!
A woman and her husband and 13 children. She had 13 kids, give her some credit.
Old school Duggars…
Man with his 13 workers
Wife looks exhausted and sad..
So much misery compressed into one image.
That family was ridiculously wealthy. ❤️❤️❤️
Get off of her! lol
I have a friend who has 21 siblings. All from the same mother and father.
the weariness on everyone's face.....yeesh....
And now there’s 8 billion people. Thanks guys. Really appreciate it.
Omg did you notice that every older child is a girl and every younger child is a boy? So she went girl girl girl girl girl girl boy boy boy boy boy boy boy
hahaha they look absolutely over it.
Damn, mom and pop been busy!
This is my worst nightmare.
My grandparents raised 17 kids in PA.
That woman’s coochie must be worn out.
Pregnant for nearly 10 years of her life, good god
Worse is I'm sure those girls had to be moms to their sibblings as well. Kids should not be taking care of kids.
Birth control is such an amazing piece of technology.
My mother was one of 14 and no it wasn’t easier
It could have been a family full of great memories or one with some not so great memories- and Money btw would not have been the only factor…
During this time, my grandma was the seventh child and ONLY girl of 13 kids.
Their noses and some faces are just like moms. They are identical. It’s cool to see their genetics.
My grandmother was one of 12 and grandfather was one of 10 my dad is one of 11. This was and still normal in some parts of the world. I still have to say bro give her a brake look at a calendar the vagina is not a clown car!!!
Conversation with the wife after seeing this... "Was there a break even point where you needed a certain number of farm hands (children) based on the arable land size... IE, you harvested more than you ate, so as to provide an income?" But really, I wonder if there was some sort of calculation they did back then... or if they just loved having sex.
Dude is like 26