SNGF with Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings

I always seems to miss participating in Randy Seaver's SNGF but this week, thanks to some early posts by other bloggers, I was reminded and will participate. 

As you may know Randy poses a meme each week for bloggers to blog or comment about.  Tonight the meme is:

1) Determine who is one of the most prolific fathers in your genealogy database or in your ancestry. By prolific, I mean the one who fathered the most children.

2) Tell us about him in your own blog post, in comments to this blogpost, or in comments on Facebook.

Most times, when I read various memes posted by genealogy bloggers, several ancestors come to mind who could fit the critera and I can choose which one to write about, but with this meme, there was no doubt in my mind about who I would write about. My maternal gt gt gt grandfather, Jonathan Wise has any other ancestor beat hands down. 

Jonathan Wise was born in Greene county, Pennsylvania on the 28th of February, 1799.  He was the oldest son of a family of nine children.  As a young man he moved with his family to Monroe county, Ohio.  There he met his wife, Jennie or Virginia Young, a young Irish lass and they married about 1822.  His first child was born in 1823 and regular as clock work, every two years another child was born.  In February 1839, Jennie died, probably in childbirth or shortly after, as a son Jonathan Wise Jr was born 12 February 1839. 

So in seventeen years Jonathan and Jennie had eight children. 

Within a year, Jonathan married again to Martha Antill, a young woman eighteen years his junior.  By March of 1841, their first child was born and he continued to father children for the next seventeen years with his last child born in 1858.  Chances are Jonathan would have continued to have more children, but he died in March of 1859 at the age of 60. 

So in another seventeen years, Jonathan and Martha had ten children.

In total, between his two wives, Jonathan had EIGHTEEN children;  SEVEN girls and ELEVEN boys.  All of the children lived to adulthood except one son who apparently died as a young child.