Monday, December 27, 2010

Size is Relative

CNN ran a story on Christmas featuring a 98-year-old woman who had 100 grandchildren (actually 24 grandchildren, 57 great grandchildren, and 19 great great grandchildren).  Someone thought this was news.

My 4X great grandmother, Jael Kavanaugh Woods, doubled this.  Interviewed at age eighty (1845), she noted that she had 16 children (all living to be adults), 104 grandchildren, and 91 great grandchildren.  By the time of her death in 1848, a few more had been added.

Jael was born in Culpeper County, Virginia, in 1765, and moved with her parents to Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia) at a young age.  At seventeen, she married Peter Woods, an itinerant Babtist minister, and started a family (2).  At twenty-five (1790), she moved to Madison County, Kentucky, where her remaining 14 children were born.  At forty-five (1810), she and her husband moved the entire family (children ranging in age from one to twenty-five) to Franklin County, Tennessee; and from there (1819) to Cooper County, Missouri.

The children were born in largely unsettled territory, without doctors or hospitals.  These families travelled by wagon;  built their own homes (including their roads and churches); sewed their own clothes; grew or hunted for their food; cooked on wood stoves; dug wells for water.  No malls; no McDonald's.  Of course, this was before the age of entitlement.

You frequently hear that the United States is a nation of immigrants.  After the Civil War, as the country industrialized and the cities grew, this may have become true.  The reality is that although everyone descends from original immigrants, most of the early population growth came from settlers (or slaves) having generations of large families.  Seldom do you see pioneer families marrying recent immigrants. More likely they marry members of their own community (frequently second or third cousins).

Jael Woods' daughter Mary Woods Dallas also had 16 children; and her daughter-in-law Susan Jennings Woods (my 3X great grandmother and wife of  Charles Woods) had 12.  Only in the 20th century did the size of the families decline.

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