Showtalk said:

We are so used to tracking time I can’t even imagine what it was like living in a period when there was no uniformity to time zones.

People didn't have to worry about the HOA board enforcer going through the neighborhood to write demand letters because some elderly widow's grass is too tall while she is recuperating from major surgery. And generally one didn't have to worry about most of the kind of problems we have today.

No they didn’t.  No HOAs.  Their problems were much more basic.

Showtalk said:

No they didn’t. No HOAs. Their problems were much more basic.

Like they could starve if they had a hailstorm or a swarm of locusts get their crops.

And many illnesses and injuries back then were almost invariably fatal. No "golden hour" to get to a Level 1 trauma center. Most just died where they fell in those days.

And I think less than half of all babies born survived to adolescence. You can certainly walk through an old cemetery and see a huge number of tiny graves in a row at the foot of the parents' graves. Thus most couples might have 6 to 8 kids to possibly get 2 all the way to independent adulthood.

That was true as recently as the early 1900s. I’ve heard stories from families about their great grandparents who had one or two children but lost many more. The occasional huge family was very lucky.  My friend who is from farming country came from a family where the great grandparents had around a dozen children that grew to adulthood. So by the time the friend was born they had literally hundreds of cousins and distant cousins.

My grandfather had 11 brothers & sisters and my grandmother had 12 brothers & sisters. All lived fairly long lives.

So that alone made up 25 relatives.

We have a family reunion every 4 years and anywhere from 400 ~ 500 people turn up at the events.

FWIW

You are from one of those big, healthy families.