On May 28, 1934, Oliva and Elzire Dionne of Corbeil, Ontario became the parents of five tiny baby girls: Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie. Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe helped deliver the premature babies, who together weighed about 13.6 pounds. The identical quintuplets were the first quintuplets in the world to survive more than a few days. News of the miracle babies soon spread to newspapers around the globe.
Oliva Dionne was a poor French-Canadian farmer. His wife Elzire was twenty-five when the quintuplets were born--and already the mother of six other children. They were put by an open stove to keep warm, and mothers from surrounding villages brought breast milk for them. Against all expectations, they survived their first weeks.
The girls grew up in a compound, away from their family. For nine years the quintuplets lived in a sort of theme park know as "Quintland", to which about three million tourists came to observe them through a one-way screen. The little girls became a major visitor attraction for the province of Ontario, bringing in an estimated $250 million dollars per year in today's dollars.
Above is a postcard, dated 1939, that my aunt sent to my grandmother from "Quintland ".
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5 comments:
Oh my goodness! That postcard is fabulous. It would be interesting to here their after stories!
Wow the postcard and story are amazing and frightening, too. I wonder if anyone has followed up on these 5, what their lives were like, etc.
I was born in 1937 and these 5 little girls were quit the news item during my growing up years. I hadn't thought of them in years. Nice momento of history for you to have.
Susan
Hi Suzy! Thanks for dropping by my blog. The story about the girls is so neat. Thanks for sharing. By the way all of your pictures from you trip are so beautiful. It is nice to get to meet you.
Thanks for sharing the postcard! I had never heard those little girls weren't raised with their family~how sad for them. They were beautiful little girls!
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