THE CASE FOR BIRTH CONTROL

It seems too bad that the old system of registering marriages, children, and other incidentals was not as efficient as the present one. Perhaps in the more rapid days of Western expansion, it seemed unimportant to set down facts which were only too obvious at the time.

The most recent case of sudden relationship concerns the estate of the late Lotta Crabiree, who died unmarried and childless with a private fortune of some $5,000,000 which she left to world war veterans, agricultural students, and other worthy groups. Since her death, the country has suddenly become populated with the relations: fourty-nine cousins, no less, a niece, and, strangest of all, a daughter. The latter, one Ida Blankenburg, was supposedly the offspring of a dim and juvenile marriage in far off Texas which nobody thought much about at the time, such things being quite customary. Evidently Miss. Blankenburg almost forgot the matter herself, what with steer raising and one thing and another. After all its hard to remember off-hand whom one's father married, and when, and why. In the same class is Carlotta Crabtree whom Attorney J. J. Hoy testifies is Lotta Crabiree's living niece, who has just thought of the rather amusing fact that she is the daughter of John Crabtree, Lotta's formerly childless brother. This other trifling circumstance happened out in Arizona where things always have been a little hazy anyway. The sad moral of this tale is that one should either be careful where and whom one marries, or remember the casual affair afterwards.