A dead lawyer's prank of a will turned into a decade-long baby race between cash-strapped families — and Canada's highest court said the payout was legal.
Charles Vance Millar was a wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier known for his practical jokes. When he died in 1926 with no heirs, his will turned out to be one long joke played on the entire city — deliberately written to make greed do something ridiculous.
Millar left shares in a racetrack to men who publicly opposed horse racing, brewery stock to teetotal Protestant ministers, and a shared Jamaican vacation home to three men who despised each other and were required to live there together.
The most notorious clause offered his entire remaining fortune to whichever Toronto woman gave birth to the most children in the ten years after his death. Newspapers dubbed the ensuing competition the 'Great Stork Derby,' and cash-strapped families during the Depression took it dead seriously.
Relatives challenged the will as an offense to public decency, but the case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld it as entirely legal — though it ruled that stillborn children and those born out of wedlock wouldn't count toward the total.
By 1936, four mothers — Annie Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Maclean — were declared tied winners, each having had nine children in the decade. They split the fortune, each receiving $110,000, worth roughly $2.35 million today.
Two other competitors, Lillian Kenny and Pauline Mae Clarke, had also borne large numbers of children but had some disqualified over technicalities; they settled for $12,500 each rather than continue fighting the ruling in court.