Leslie Jones, was a Boston, Massachusetts photographer who worked for Boston Herald-Traveler newspaper for 39 years from 1917 to 1956. His photographs document both the usual and the unusual in the daily life of Boston. Sometime in 1925, Jones captured the unusual part when he paid a visit to a local wife and husband that had been buying a lot of shoes, not because they had shoe-wear obsession, but because they had thirteen children.
At the time, an average family had 2 to 3 children, while this big family was fitting an entire clan under a single umbrella.
Unfortunately, there are no details of the story or the names of the family, because it have been lost. However, the photographer has managed to capture the atmosphere in the “Full House” and offers a glimpse in an ordinary day in a family with thirteen kids running around the house. All photos by Lessie Jones/Boston Public Library
Eventhough, their fertillity is impressive, this couple is not even close to the world records of familly with the most children.Vassilyev and his first wife, Valentina Vassilyeva, hold the record for the most children a couple has parented. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 births. 67 of the 69 children born were said to have survived infancy. (Vassilyev also had six sets of twins and two sets of triplets with a second wife, for another 18 children in eight births; he fathered a total of 87 children.)A Tuscan woman named Gravata gave birth to a total of 62 live children. Maddalena Granata (born 1839) of the City of Nocera, Italy, who married at age 28, had given birth to 52 living and dead children, 49 being males, by 1886. Dr. de Sanctis, of Nocera, stated that she had 15 sets of triplets.