One of my all time favorite books is Cheaper By The Dozen. It’s a fictionalized version of the real life of the Gilbreth family of twelve children in the 1920s, whose father was an engineer and a pioneer in the field of motion study and whose mother was also an engineer and a psychologist. Father Gilbreth used to apply his motion study principles to his large family and this book includes funny stories about how the children skipped grades through school, learned Morse code and French and got their tonsils removed en masse. After doing some research I found out that the second oldest child, Mary, died at age six, which meant that the dozen children were never contemporaries. But the family included her in spirit so that made up the dozen in the title. The version on hoopla that is in our catalogue includes photos of the family and many other photos are on the Internet for those who are interested in what the real family looked like.
Long before the Duggar family of 19 Kids And Counting television fame the most well known large family was the Gilbreths of the Cheaper By The Dozen books. I first read