Charles Vance Miller, a wealthy Toronto lawyer, directed his estate be given to the Toronto mother who gave birth to the most children during the ten years immediately following his death. Miller practiced law from 1881 - 1926 and died a bachelor with no children at the age of 73 from a heart attack. During his life, he liked to play tricks on people by leaving dollar bills on the sidewalk and laugh at the expressions on people’s faces as they picked them up. When he wrote his Last Will and Testament, his sense of humor was recorded on paper. Miller is quoted “This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependents or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death and what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.”

It was clause 9 which caused the frantic race to have the most babies. It stated;
“All the rest and residue of my property wheresoever situate I give, devise and bequeath unto my Executors and Trustees named below in Trust to convert into money as they deem advisable and invest all the money until the expiration of nine years from my death and then call in and convert it all into money and at the expiration of ten years from my death to give it and its accumulations to the Mother who has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children as shown by the Registrations under the Vital Statistics Act. If one of more mothers have equal highest number of registrations under the said Act to divide the said moneys and accumulations equally between them.”

At the time of his death he had $100,000 which became worth $750,000 by the time that the prize was given out. At that time, minimum wage was about 20 cents per hour. The media often mentioned the Miller Will and created The Great Stork Derby with the talk of the time being the mothers in the lead.

Before the prize was given out the following legal issues had to be sorted out.
1.  Was Clause 9 Legal?
2. What constitutes “Toronto?
3. Do stillborns count? How many minutes must a baby live?
4. Are improperly registered births counted?
5. Do illegitimate children count?

The Ontario provincial government tried to scrap Miller's Will because it felt that it promoted “unseemly behavior” and encouraged the wrong kind of people (the poor and weak minded) to have more babies. Even Millers distant relatives sued claiming the will was invalid. It took courts years to sort out the problems after the race ended in 1936 and eventually ended in the Canadian Supreme Court. With the following mothers all claiming part of the prize

Annie Katherine Smith   9 babies    $125,000
Kathleen Ellen Nagel     9 babies     $125,000
Lucy Alice Timleck         9 babies     $125,000
Isabel Mary Maclean      9 babies    $125,000
Lillian Kenny                 12 babies    $  12,500    (court settlement for dropping her appeal, she was disqualified for having too many stillborn babies)
Pauline Mae Clarke      10 babies    $ 12,500  (court settlement for dropping her appeal, she was disqualified for having some of the babies by a man other than her husband (illegitimate children were not acknowledged in Canadian court in the 1930's especially when it came to wills)  

Here are some other unusual things that Miller included in his will:

He left stock shares to the Ontario Jockey Club (a racetrack) to two moral men who deplored gambling.

He left a vacation home in Jamaica to three lawyers who hated each other forcing them to share it. However, Miller sold the property before he died.

He gave one share of brewery stock (O'Keefe Brewery Company) and racetrack stocks to every Protestant minister in Toronto.

To top that off, the brewery was owned by the Catholic Church. Later, it was found out that his estate did not actually own any brewery stock.