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History of Mother's Day

  Mother's Day in the United States was first proclaimed in 1870 in Boston by Julia Ward Howe, and Howe called for it to be observed each year nationally in 1872. As originally envisioned, Howe's "Mother's Day" was a call for Pacifism and disarmament by women. Early "Mother's Day" was mostly marked by women's peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War.

In 1907 Mother's Day was first celebrated in a small private way by Anna Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate the anniversary of her mother's death two years earlier on May 9, 1905. Jarvis's mother, also named Anna Jarvis, had been active in Mother's Day campaigns for peace and worker's safety and health. The younger Jarvis launched a quest to get wider recognition of Mother's Day. The celebration organized by Jarvis on May 10, 1908 involved 407 children with their mothers at the Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton. The following campaign to recognize Mother's Day was financed by clothing merchant John Wanamaker. As the custom of Mother's Day spread, the emphasis shifted from the pacificism and reform movements to a general appreciation of mothers.

The first official recognition of the holiday was by West Virginia in 1910.

A proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day was signed by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson on May 14, 1914.

A tradition calls for the wearing of carnations on Mother's Day—a red one if one's mother is alive, and white if she has died.

 

"Famous Mothers"

The youngest mother whose history is authenticated is Lina Medina, who delivered a 6½-pound boy by cesarean section in Lima, Peru in 1939, at an age of 5 years and 7 months. The child was raised as her brother and only discovered that Lina was his mother when he was 10.

On April 9, 2003, Satyabhama Mahapatra, a 65-year-old retired schoolteacher in India, became the world's oldest mother when she gave birth to a baby boy. Satyabhama and her husband had been married 50 years, but this is their first child. The baby was conceived through artificial insemination using eggs from the woman's 26-year-old niece, Veenarani Mahapatra, and the sperm of Veenarani's husband.

UPDATE: The oldest known birth mother in the world currently is Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara of Spain who gave delivered twins at the age of 66 in 2006.

Bobbie McCaughey is the mother who holds the record for the most surviving children from a single birth. She gave birth to the first set of surviving septuplets - four boys and three girls -on November 19, 1997, at the University Hospital, Iowa, US. Conceived by in vitro fertilization, the babies were delivered after 31 weeks by caesarean in the space of 16 minutes. The babies are named Kenneth, Nathaniel, Brandon, Joel, Kelsey, Natalie and Alexis.

Jayne Bleackley is the mother who holds the record for the shortest interval between two children born in separate confinements. She gave birth to Joseph Robert on September 3, 1999, and Annie Jessica Joyce on March 30, 2000. The babies were born 208 days apart.

Elizabeth Ann Buttle is the mother who holds the record for the longest interval between the birth of two children. She gave birth to Belinda on May 19,1956 and Joseph on November 20, 1997. The babies were born 41 years 185 days apart. The mother was 60 years old when her son Joseph was born.

The highest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia. Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.

The modern world record for giving birth is held by Leontina Albina from San Antonio, Chile. Leontina claims to be the mother of 64 children, of which only 55 of them are documented. She is listed in the 1999 Guinness World Records but dropped from later editions.

Jenna Cotton gave birth to three children on the same date - October 2. Her son, Ayden, arrived on Oct. 2, 2003; son Logan was born Oct. 2, 2006, and daughter Kayla was born Tuesday, which was Oct. 2, 2007. The odds of a family having three children born on the same date in different years are about 7.5 in 1 million.

51-year-old Rosinete Palmeira Serrao, gave birth to twins on September 30, 2007 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Serrao served as a surrogate mother after four years of failed attempts at pregnancy by her 27-year-old daughter, Claudia Michelle de Brito.

One early reference to an aged mother can be found in the Bible, where Sarah is described as having given birth to her husband Abraham's son, Isaac, at the age of 90.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the former U.S. Senator and Vice Presential nominee John Edwards, gave birth to son Jack in 2000 at the age of 51. The couple decided to have children again after their 16-year-old son was killed in a car accident in 1996.

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Katherine Hepburn's father was a surgeon and her mother was a dedicated suffragette and early crusader for birth control.

Kim Basinger's mother had been a champion swimmer who performed water ballets in several Esther Williams movies in the 1940s.

Laura Dern earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her illuminating performance as the title character in Rambling Rose, an underrated picture in 1991 that also won a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her mother, Diane Ladd. This was the first time a mother-daughter team had been so honored; they became the first mother and daughter ever nominated for Academy Awards for the same movie.

Madonna's mother died when she was five years old.

Phyllis Diller, a 40-year-old mother of five and an advertising copywriter for a California radio station, made a rousing comedy debut at San Francisco's Purple Onion in 1957.

American talk show host Conan O'Brien's father is Dr. Thomas O'Brien, a noted epidemiologist, the head of microbiology at Peter Brigham Hospital, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. His mother, Ruth Reardon O'Brien, was a partner at Ropes & Gray law firm outside Boston until her 1997 retirement.

Elvis Presley, was a mama's boy. He slept in the same bed with his mother, Gladys, until he reached puberty. Up until Elvis entered high school, she walked him back and forth to school every day and made him take along his own silverware so that he wouldn't catch germs from the other kids. Gladys forbade young Elvis from going swimming or doing anything that might put him in danger. The two of them also conversed in a strange baby talk that only they could understand.

Meredith Baxter-Birney played the mother, Elyse Keaton on the hit TV sitcom Family Ties. Her actress mother, Whitney Blake, also played a mom: Dorothy Baxter, on TV's Hazel.

James McNeill Whistler's best known painting, often called "Whistler's Mother," is actually titled "Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother."

Many of the sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers on the popular television show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, were actually knitted by his real mother.

Monkee Mike Nesmith's mother, Bette Nesmith Graham was the inventor of Liquid Paper correction fluid. She sold the rights to the Gillette Corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million and when she died in 1980, she left half of her fortune to her son Michael.

Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother and to shield him from the shame, Eric grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.

Hoyt Axton wrote Three Dog Night's "Joy To The World". His mother, Mae Axton wrote "Heartbreak Hotel" for Elvis Presley.

Actress Jane Seymour's mother, Mieke Frankenberg, was born in Holland and lived in Indonesia during World War II, where she spent more than three years in a Japanese concentration camp.

Jack Nicholson, born on April 22, 1937, had been the illegitimate child of 17-year-old June Nicholson. Nicholson had spent his life up to age 37 assuming that his biological mother, June, was his sister, and that his maternal grandmother, Ethel May, was his mother. Even on their deathbeds, neither June nor Ethel May had offered up the truth.