Twins, triplets, and family trees

An interesting aspect of genealogy is multiple births, which old records can help us uncover. To continue our Family History Month series, we look at some cases of multiple births recorded in old church records. Twins, triplets, and other multiple births have long been part of Philippine family life, although their stories sometimes survive only in a few handwritten lines. One Philippine medical paper states that approximately 7.2 twin gestations per 1,000 births. A separate Philippine General Hospital study recorded 17.5 multiple pregnancies per 1,000 deliveries between September 2000 and August 2002. These figures come from different sources, and cannot be combined into a national range or used to assign the Philippines a world ranking.

International research shows relatively low twin rates in parts of Southeast Asia. But for genealogists, the more interesting question is what individual records reveal about the children themselves. During the Spanish period, priests frequently identified twins through the word mellizos, written beside or within a baptismal entry. These small notes can explain why siblings shared a birthday, appeared together in a register, or were baptized separately only days apart.

A single baptismal record in 1738 in Bulacan shows several pairs, including Blas and Maria de la Peña, Agustin and Matheo Aguirre, and Manuela and Maria Samson, each pair identified as mellizos. Within one surviving page, three households acquire details that a list of names alone would miss. An especially striking entry comes from Bauang, dated October 14, 1790. It names Maria Baptista, Ana Maria Baptista, and Agustina Baptista together, yet records them mellizos. But this was not a mistake. A linguistic study by the Instituto Cervantes explains that older Spanish used expressions such as tresmellizos and tresgemelos before trillizo only became established in the twentieth century. We therefore have to read the whole entry rather than assume the margin tells us the number.

Other records distinguish twins more explicitly. In Gasan, Marinduque, Alejo and Marcelino Celestino were baptized on July 20, 1879. Their entries identify them as the first and second twins. In Cavite Viejo, now Kawit, Manuel and Victor Simenes were baptized on December 16, 1875. Sometimes even names fail to separate siblings. Two Santa Rosa, Laguna, entries dated March 1, 1893, both identify a three-day old boy as Juan Hernandez, son of Leoncio Hernandez and Elena Castro. Both carry the notation mellizos. Different godfathers help distinguish the entries, reminding us how easily a researcher could mistake them for duplicates.

In 1902, in Argao, triplets were recorded for the first time. On June 11 that year, Felix, Bernabe, and Fortunato Geverola were born to Laureano Geverola and Jacinta Lanutan. Interestingly, all three survived at least for the next few days. Their mother died the next day, whose cause of death was “de mal parto”, or from a bad birth, while Felix died four days later due to “inflamacion”, or severe localized infection.

In 1923, physician Rebecca Parish reported two Filipino triplet deliveries at Manila’s Mary Johnston Hospital in April 1919 and July 1923. Later, a 1967 study using birth records from the Philippine General Hospital and Maternity and Children’s Hospital between 1959 and 1965 found twins in 1.17% of its sample. In 2009, The Philippine STAR reported Lorita Barrera’s delivery of quintuplets in Manila. A subsequent report recorded the death of one daughter, Melody Frances. Earlier cases of quintuplets include Cotabato in 1995, where quintuplets were born but all five reportedly died within hours. In Tagum City in 2007, the five Molino sisters also died shortly after birth.

These remind us that multiple births are more than an unusual number. Each child has a separate story. Genealogy helps recover those distinctions through baptismal entries, birth certificates, hospital reports, and later family records. For this month, such discoveries bring us closer to the households behind our family trees. A brief notation can reveal siblings forgotten in family memory, explain an apparent duplicate, or preserve a child who died young. Reading carefully allows every child a place in the family’s history.