4. The parents died, the daughter married, and the "story of her birth" was forgotten: until the publication of White's Sheffield Directory in 1833, when, among other local memorabilia, the strange announcement of "ten children at birth," was reproduced on the contemporary authority of the Leeds Mercury. From that time Mrs. Platts has been more or less an object of curiosity.
5. The Directory paragraph is as follows:—
"An instance of extraordinary fecundity is recorded in the Leeds Mercury of 1781, which says that Ann [Sarah] Birch, of Sheffield, was, in that year, delivered of ten children!!! We, in our time, have heard of Sheffield ladies having three children at birth; but we know no other case, but that of the aforesaid Mrs. Birch, which countenances the fructiferous fame which they have obtained in some circles."
I have been unsuccessful in an effort to collate the foregoing with the original newspaper paragraph: but Mr. White, while he personally assured me of the veracity of the transcript, also pointed out to me an earlier version of the same fact from the same source in the Annals of the Clothing Districts, published about thirty years since.
6. In conformity with the suggestion (NOTES AND QUERIES, Vol. ii., p. 459), I have examined the Parish Register of Baptisms, but the entry is as curt and formal as possible, viz.:—
"Sarah, Dr. of Thos. and Sarah Birch, Cutler,"
under the date, Dec. 12.1781.
Taking all the foregoing circumstances into account, there seems to me little ground for the erection of any strong objection to the alleged fact—extraordinary as it is—of ten children having been brought forth at one time; or, to the hardly less interesting coincidence, that one of them is still living. I cannot but add, that if the contemporary notice of this extraordinary birth in the Leeds Mercury of 1781 should not be admitted as good evidence for the fact, it does, at least, negative the presumptive value of any objection
derived from the silence of the writer in the Philosophical Transactions six years afterwards; strange as such silence assuredly appears. After all, the question occurs: What has become of the bodies said to have been preserved? As all parties concur in naming "old Mr. Staniforth" as the accoucheur in attendance on Mrs. Birch; and as that gentleman has been dead many years, I called upon his eldest surviving pupil, Mr. Nicholson, surgeon, to ask him whether, in conversation, or among the preparations in the surgery of his worthy master, he had ever met with any illustration of the parturition in question? He replied that he had not. It may not, perhaps, be out of place here to mention that the above-named Mr. Nicholson, surgeon, himself delivered a poor woman of five children, on the 10th of February, 1829, at Handsworth Woodhouse, near Sheffield. This case was even more remarkable than that which gave occasion to the paper which was read before the Royal Society in 1787, inasmuch as not only were four of the children born alive, but three of them lived to be baptized.
N.D.