To find a well-matched partner and live a long productive life is a dream of many. Perhaps it’s possible to achieve these two aims if we choose our mates wisely and the winds of fate are with us. Statistically it’s becoming more and more unlikely to for us “to leave the dance with the one that brought us.” The high rate of divorce is pointed out in How Random are Relationships.
One old formula for lifelong happiness is marrying a person born on the same exact day because supposedly it brings joy to both partners each day thereafter. And with a love so deep how can one go on without the other, so must both die on the same day as not to break the other’s heart. These days romantic stories appear online about time twins who meet-up and marry. These pairs swear that the love they feel is not only powerful, but impossible to describe.
The Huntrodds have been buried in a crypt
for more than four hundred years.
Every year thousands of tourists visit the Huntrodd’s Memorial. It is a tribute to a seventeenth century couple whose lives conformed to the incredible ideal of being born on the same day and dying on the same day. And of course, these time twins made their shared birthday also the date of their marriage to add to the coincidental nature of their two lives. This side-by-side grave of Francis and Mary Huntrodd is located in Saint Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire.
“Here lies the bodies of Francis
Huntrodds and Mary his wife who were
both born on the same day of the week,
month and year (viz) Septr ye 19th 1600
marry’d on the day of their birth and
after having had 12 children born to
them died aged 80 years on the
same day of the year.”
“Husband and wife that did twelve
children bear, Dy’d the same day;
alike both aged were, bout eighty
years they liv’d, five hours did part
(Ev’n on the marriage day) each
tender heart so fit a match,
surely, could never be;
Both in their lives, and in
their deaths agree.”
This tribute to marital bliss appears in most of the British travel guides. The original inscription on the Huntrodd gravestone was worn being worn by the elements, so the replacement plaque will identify their burial site for years into the future. We are informed by a mathematical source that the odds of this particular situation occurring are nearly 50 billion to one. Still as strange as this day of the week coincidence may be, it could actually be true.
