When I was younger, my sister and I would listen to a lot of audio books borrowed from the library, and one of the best ones of all time was Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B Gilbreth Jr and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. It is autobiographical, chronicling what it was like to grow up in the early 1900s in the Gilbreth family. There were twelve children, six boys and six girls, and their upbringing was interesting because of the weird ways they were all raised. Their father was a motion study expert who was constantly looking for ways to make things more efficient, and in the summers they would all live in a couple of lighthouses on Nantucket Island. Enough about the book though.
Recently I was boredly browsing the internet, and I decided to look up the Gilbreth family. I had this image in my mind of what they all looked like, and so I really should have left well enough alone, but my curiosity always gets to me so I just had to find them. I thought there would be lots of pictures available since this is a pretty famous book (numerous publications and several movies have been made), but pictures were scarce. The pictures I did find, however, totally shattered my childhood memories. Of the pictures of the family members that I could actually find, none of them were anything like what I had imagined, and for a while I felt like I had ruined the magic of the book. I've since gotten over it, but it's strange how much it affected me at the time.
If seeing what the Gilbreth family actually looked like wasn't shocking enough, I just had delve deeper, and I found a complete list of birth years...and death years. Why did I look this up? Why? I knew they all grew up in the early 1900s, why did I actually have to go and confirm what I should have already known? Reality sure bites sometimes. I knew that the parents would already be dead, they were both born in the 1800s so if they were still alive I'd be kind of creeped out. And their father dies in the book so I've been over that one for years anyway. But out of twelve children - oldest born in 1905, youngest born in 1922 - only Fred is still alive (born in 1916). Can you imagine coming from a family of twelve children and being the only one left? Honestly, I'm not sure if I'd ever be able to handle it if my sister died, and she's the only sibling I have, so I can't imagine what it would be like to experience eleven sibling deaths. But then again, I think it would be hard for Fred to be as close to eleven people as I am to my sister, so maybe it wasn't as bad as I'm thinking.
I looked all of this information up recently following receiving my very own copy of Cheaper by the Dozen (audio book) as a gift. I recommend it to everyone, even though I'm not really giving it a fair chance here with this post :)
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