Sad stories, odd stories, anything happen in your family history?

[TheMagicKeyCanFuckOff]

I have found someone born in 1702. She married aged 20 and gave birth to 14 children! Of them, 8 died before the age of 10 and a further one died aged 13 (the same age as DD2). So, of 14 children, only 5 survived childhood. She lived a good age, and a further two children died before she died. She was left with three living children. Of the 9 children who died in childhood, 7 died within the same week Life must have been so tough.

Does anyone else have sad, strange, mysterious etc; stories in their family history?

I've recently been looking at my great grandmothers line. I knew she had been brought up by a stepmother and today I received some certificates that revealed what happened to her mum.

In 1902 when Ggrandmother was about 14 months old, her 22 year old mother gave birth to twins. Six days later she died from "debility after a very severe confinement", five days after that one of the twins, a baby girl, died aged just 11 days from "athripsia convulsions" - athripsia meaning malnutrition.

Such a desperately sad situation, she died as a result of a difficult birth and the baby starved (as far as I know, bottle feeding wasn't that safe or nutritious at that time) leaving the young father with a very young toddler and a newborn to look after.

This has really affected me, I've been thinking about it all day; maybe because this wasn't about a distant ancestor who lived 150 years ago but about the parent of a person I knew and loved visiting as a child.

Some great (and incredibly sad) family stories on here. I've been studying our family history for 9 years now following my grandmothers 30 years of research and it really is a very interesting (though time absorbing) hobby. I wish tv would do a proper series on 'real' peoples ancestry as some of the stories I've read and researched are much more interesting than the celebs on Who do you think you are series. I have many different tales; of suffragettes, workhouses, adoptions, divorces, strange deaths etc but one that always intrigued me is that one of my g.g. Grandfathers fathered 29 children the last a year before he died, which makes me question if he'd have carried on had he survived!! How they coped I can't imagine?!!! When people say life is tough now they'd do well to research their history - can be very humbling.

NannyR the children's deaths are so sad. They play on my mind too and as infant death was so common it's difficult to imagine what a lot of the women went through. One of my husbands g.grandfathers was dropped in an open fire as a baby but thankfully survived, however his mother was blamed and put into an asylum for the rest of her life. The four young children were seperatedand their slcoholic father died only a few years later. I read through all her hospital notes and it appears she was suffering with post natal depression and hallucinations caused by a bad case of mastitis, yet despite only being disruptive once a month(!) afterwards she was never reunited with her children. Very sad :(