Maggie's Farm

From Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750:

When Judith Somerby married Tristram Coffin in March of 1653, she was a widow with three children: Sarah, who was eight, Elizabeth, who was six, and Daniel, almost three. (Another son had died in infancy.) In the next sixteen years Judith gave birth to ten Coffin children, all of whom, remarkably, survived infancy. There is an almost saucy irony in the family name, as though some wind of Yankee humor had swept Puritan Newbury. Death seldom visited the Coffins.

By the time Judith's last baby was born in March 1669 she already had six grandchildren. From 1667 until her death in 1705 - twenty-eight years - at least one grandchild was born each year. In the most prolific period from 1686 to 1696, thirty eight infants were born, almost four a year. Judith's gravestone should probably be taken literally when its says she lived to see 177 descendants...