Twins

My grandmother was a twin (fraternal). I have two aunts who are identical twins, and one of those aunts had identical twin daughters.

Yet apart from that, isn't really any pattern of twins in my family history. There is, however, one story that's kind of interesting. You may want to draw this out to keep track of the names.

Mildred and Mabel Shellito were twins, born on August 10th, 1880. Mildred married Harold Achenbach in 1901 and had three children -- two boys and a girl. Mabel married William Parker in 1906 and had only one daughter (b1909).

In choosing a name for her daughter, Mabel picked something that was dear to her -- Mildred. Two years later, Mildred followed suit and named her daughter Mabel.

So here we have two twin sisters with one daughter each -- both of whom are named after their aunts.

Unfortunately, the Spanish influenza struck in 1918, and Mildred (the older one) died from pneumonia in November. (As Dr. Anthony Fauci explained in 2008, "...bacterial pneumonia played a major role in the mortality of the 1918 pandemic.") [Source

Harold did not remarry, and -- realizing that as a "general farmer" near Bay City, MI, he was ill-suited to raise a daughter on his own -- sent Mabel to live with her aunt Mabel and cousin Mildred in Detroit.

At this point, Mabel (the younger one) started going by her middle name, Lucille.

Lucille moved back home as she got older. When she married in 1932, her husband moved in with her and her widower father Harold. The couple had two daughters of her own in the 1930s. The named the first Janice Lee; the second, Mildred Joyce, after her mother and cousin.

(Aunt Mabel's daughter Mildred also had a daughter. Just to make things complicated, it turns out her name is Janice, too.)

It turns out Janice Lee passed away recently -- March 30, 2020...

...at the beginning of a similar pandemic to the one that killed her grandmother. She was my sixth cousin, twice removed.