Helen Miller - 21 Siblings

Contents

Foreword

To show how much she loved us, Mom cooked and baked with a passion. Always wearing a dress and apron, she spent much of her time in the kitchen, (the social center of our household, coincidentally half-way between the baby cribs and the washer/dryer). Several of my twenty-one siblings wanted their children to have the benefit of Moms recipe collection, so I started gathering Moms hand-written recipes and typing them in to my very first personal computer. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mom, teaching daughter after daughter how to cook, according to each girls interest/ability, while juggling a dozen other priorities. How could I capture Moms joy, her skill, and her zest for life, and pass it along to the next generation?

I prefer savoring the memories of meals our family ate back on the farm to memories of some pretty awesome five-star restaurants. I reminisce about a more intimate setting that made me feel insanely comfortable, happy, and satiated on multiple levels. I try to recreate that homey feeling where I enjoyed the comradery of many people seated around one table, animatedly chatting while enjoying simple but fabulous hearty Midwestern dishes.

To this day, I still dont feel completely normal unless a hubbub of friendship and hospitality surrounds me when Im eating. Without a handful of my siblings, something is missing. While I treasure peace and quiet, I absolutely love having guests for dinner. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I traveled far and wide before I came to fully appreciate the fact that theres no place like home .

At the time my parents had twelve children, the movie Cheaper by the Dozen was playing in theaters. Mom and Dad sat down with my eldest sister who was about 15 at the time and asked, Do you think we should go for an even two dozen? Things will be even Cheaper by the Two Dozen. As difficult as it is to fathom, they really did want a huge family!

Nearly thirty years ago, I started documenting Moms recipes including stories about our family. When recipes became readily available on the internet, and people lost interest in hard-copy cookbooks, I put my project on hold. Now that organic food and sustainable gardening are all the rage, and huge families are a thing of the past, my nieces and nephews are more interested in the olden days. They want to hear more stories about life on the farm with twenty-two kids.

My eldest sister is fifteen years older than I, and my youngest brother is eleven years younger. Their experiences growing up were, no doubt, completely different from mine. Growing up as a middle child gave me a unique perspective to share our family story. I picked up where I had left off in hopes that readers will share my enthusiasm for a time when life was simpler. This memoir offers my two cents worth on what it was like growing up in a huge family on a farm in southern Minnesota thriving on locally-produced food.

How do you feed all those kids, mister?

They come cheaper by the dozen, you know.

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Cary in Cheaper by the Dozen

Chapter :

In the Beginning

I grew up the 13th of twenty-two children from one mother and one father, all born between December 21st, 1940 and January 13th, 1966. No twins, no triplets, and no fertility drugs. Thats fifteen girls and seven boys, twenty-two natural-born single births in twenty-five years plus three weeks.

When their first child was born, Dad was twenty-three and Mom had just turned eighteen. Needless to say, my parents thrived on raising children. When asked why they had so many, and whether they were planned, Mom said, I want all the children that God gives me. After she suffered a miscarriage on her 23rd pregnancy, Moms doctor shocked her when he advised against additional pregnancies. Mom returned home with a heavy heart.

Because the U.S. census bureau doesnt keep statistics on family size, we cant prove we are the largest family in America. The Guinness Book of World Records declined my application for largest family in deference to a Russian woman who supposedly bore 69 children circa 1705. They also declined my application for the most single births in the least amount of time, stating that they did not want to start a new category. According to Wikipedia, our family holds the record for the largest living single-birth family in the U.S. in this century.

Given the way the birth rate is dropping, my parents enduring legacy may go down in history as having raised the last huge family in America. Until 2013, seventy-three years after my eldest sibling was born, all twenty-two Miller siblings were alive and well.

People often ask: How did they do it? How did they feed 22 children? How can anyone afford clothes for that many? How did your parents keep track of you? How did they get you to behave? How big was your house? Did you all sit at the same table and eat together? Did you have servants? How many bedrooms? How could you afford a college education?

Hundreds of times throughout my life, inquiring minds have wanted to know. For all of you who so often encouraged me to write a book, let me attempt to tell it like it was, or, at least, the way I remember it.

My Irish and German mother, Lucille Rose Kahnke Miller, was the third of seven Kahnke children raised on a farm in Janesville, MN. She came from humble beginnings where both boys and girls learned to milk cows by hand. We had plenty of work after school , Mom wrote in her memoir entitled My Career, hauling in wood and water and feeding cows, horses, chickens, and hogs. For a few years, we also had sheep [ ] and about 15-20 cows to milk Chores were a lot of work because there was no electricity or running water in those days. She could harness and hitch her familys team of horses to work the barley, oats, corn, and alfalfa fields, including pulling a wagon while she hand-picked corn to feed their herd of hogs.

When Mom was still a young teenager, her fathers health declined. Suddenly she found herself doing farm chores normally accomplished by a grown man. Without the help of her father, she and her siblings just barely kept their farm running.

As the country sunk further into the Great Depression, my mothers family posted a hand-carved face of a kitty by the railroad that ran past their farm. Drifters who noticed it while riding the train knew they would be welcome to exchange farm labor for a hot meal and a place to rest. It is entirely characteristic of my mothers incessant optimism that feeding these homeless drifters was the only anecdote Mom shared regarding the Great Depression.

At that time, Moms younger sister, Marg, lived at home and helped run the family farm. Sixty some years later, Marg burst into tears all over again as she told the story of how Grama Kahnke (as we affectionately called her) asked her excited daughter what was needed for her upcoming wedding. Marg responded, a dress, hat and shoes. They drove an hour to get to to the store before Grama reached in her purse and pulled out her last two dollars. Handing it to Marg, she said, This can help you with the shoes. Marg was devastated; her mother was her only source of income.