Charles Vance Millar died on October 31, 1926, in Toronto, Canada, at the age of 72. He had no wife, children, or living relatives, but he did have an estate worth nearly 500,000 Canadian dollars at the time —about 9 million dollars today— and a particular taste for cruel jokes.
In his will, he included an unusual clause: the money would go to the woman in the city who gave birth to the greatest number of children during the decade following his death. The deadline ended exactly ten years later, on October 31, 1936, at 4:30 in the afternoon. Eleven families officially competed, in the midst of the Great Depression, while lawyers debated whether children born out of wedlock or stillborn children should count.
Annie Smith, Kathleen Nagle, Lucy Timleck, and Isabel MacLean tied with nine children each and split the fund. Before his death, Millar would often leave bills on the sidewalk just to hide and watch people fight over picking them up.