Last of the Famous Great Depression Quintuplets Dies at 91 from Alzheimer’s Complications

Last of the Famous Great Depression Quintuplets Dies at 91 from Alzheimer’s Complications

Great Depression quintuplets – famous quintuplets – Annette Dionne, the last of the famous Dionne quintuplets, has died. She was 91.

Family spokesperson Carlo Tarini announced that Annette died at a hospital in Montreal on Dec. 24 due to complications of Alzheimer’s disease, according to The New York Times.

The Dionne Quints Home Museum, the relocated birthplace and home of the world-famous quintuplets in North Bay, Ontario, confirmed the news on social media.

“It is with deep regret that we announce the passing of Annette on Christmas Eve,” the museum said on Facebook. “Much beloved, Annette had championed children’s rights. She believed it was important to maintain the Dionne Quints Museum and the history it provides for the future of all children.”

Annette and her four sisters — Marie, Yvonne, Cécile and Émilie — were born prematurely on a farm in Corbeil, Ontario, on May 28, 1934, and quickly garnered worldwide fame as the first quintuplets known to survive infancy, according to Life Magazine. 

Of the Dionne quintuplets, who weighed a combined 14 pounds at the time of their birth, Annette was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth and the first to recognize her name. Along with her sisters, Annette became a tourist attraction who was taken away from her parents in 1935 to be shown at the World’s Fair in Chicago.

“We dwelt at the center of a circus. A carnival set in the middle of nowhere,” the siblings wrote in their 1964 autobiography, We Were Five. “Money was the monster. So many around us were unable to resist the temptation.”

Though their parents won the girls back in a custody battle when they were nine years old, the five sisters decided to leave home once they turned 18 and cut off almost all contact with their family, per Life Magazine.

In the mid 1990s, Annete, Cecile and Yvonne revealed in their book, The Dionne Quintuplets: Family Secrets, that they suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their father when he took them for car rides one at a time.

After spending 20 years away from home in Montreal, Annette returned to the log cabin where she and her sisters were born in 2018 to attend a ceremony celebrating their birth as a National Historic Event, according to CBC News.

“There was a lot of suffering for the sisters as part of their childhood,” Tarini told the outlet at the time. “What we want to do is talk about the good that can come out of their existence and their survival. It is truly a story of survival and about ensuring the proper raising of children.”

Before Annette’s death, her sister Cécile died in July following a long illness, the Canadian Press and CBC News reported. Émilie died in 1954, Marie died in 1970, and Yvonne died in 2001.

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