Posted on 05/09/2005 11:47:41 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
19 kids, 50 years of marriage and 1 happy Wisconsin mother
DANE, Wis. - Donna Taylor, a Dane County mother of 19 children, had plenty to celebrate on the weekend.
There was Mother's Day of course, but Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of Donna and Tom, who raised 10 girls and nine boys at a very long kitchen table on their 198-acre farm near Dane.
With 36 living grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, Donna, 66, told the Wisconsin State Journal about the secret to an enduring marriage and an orderly household.
"You've got to learn to share," Donna said. "Everything we earned, we earned together. You've got to have a commitment to one another."
Donna Marks was 16 and Tom was 20 when the two wed on May 7, 1955, at St. Michael's Church in Dane. After their wedding dinner and reception, the couple headed to Tom's parents' farm to help with the evening chores.
It was a fitting start to their new life together, a life built on self-sufficiency and hard work. And kids, of course; lots of kids.
By the time the family's only set of twins arrived - Denise and Diane, now 44 - Donna and Tom had half a dozen in the house, four of them in diapers. Donna did laundry every day for nearly a quarter-century.
In 1966, the Taylors left their rented land and bought the 198-acre spread outside Dane where they raised hogs, sheep, rabbits, pigeons, steers and dairy cows. The dinner table was filled with vegetables from the garden, meat from the barnyard, eggs from the henhouse and milk pasteurized on the stove.
Though she was a young mother, Donna relied on instinct and good sense to guide her parenting. "I never had to go home and ask Mom what to do," she said proudly. Still, there were surprises - like the twins, unexpected by both Donna and her doctor, even though "I was horribly big," she recalled.
"We never really said how many we'd have. We never set a limit. We loved children. It never crossed my mind that we couldn't take care of them, not ever, ever, ever," she said.
Through 18 pregnancies, Donna never curbed her workload, suffered morning sickness, or had a Caesarean delivery, even though one infant boy weighed close to 11 pounds.
Born over a period of 26 years, the Taylor kids say they almost grew up in three different families, each in a different decade and at a different point in their parents' lives. Still, many of the girls gravitated toward jobs in the health care field, while the boys are known for being able to fix or build just about anything.
They all live in south-central Wisconsin.
I don't go to his concerts and hold up bic lighters. I just think he has some valid points.
I just think that the only non-replacable resource we've got is people. People can come up with ways around any other shortage, if we've got the incentive.
And I'd rather we have the vigorously growing population than, say, China.
I think you're wrong. The only non-replaceable resource we have is space.
But it's all off topic and more than I meant to get into on this thread.
Ok - just want to point out that with a few more incentives and people-resources, we can have all the space we want. I'm ready to move to Luna City as soon as I get the offer.
Heh... That's not really the quality of space I want. And I think we have a few obstacles to overcome before we can ship you off to Luna City.
Holy cow, little Dane Wis in the news. Once upon a time I was chased out of a Dane Beer Tent by the local farm boys for my big mouth and got roughed up a bit until my friends rescued me, threw me in a car and then fish-tailed it out of there, beer cans hitting our escaping car. Quite the little adventure in Dane.
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