Meet the first girl child to be born to a family after 200 years...

The last time the Mason Lawrie’s family had a baby girl was in 1809, that was Mason’s great-great-great Aunt Bessie, born more than 200 years ago in the same year as Charles Darwin. Read the emotional story below;

“When little Myla Lawrie was brought home from hospital four months ago, a veritable sea of pink greeted her, with clouds of balloons filling the sitting room, along with cards, bunting and ribbons in every shade of girliness.

For this was a very special event in the Lawrie family. When Myla was born in October, she was the first girl to be born in her family since 1809. The last time a midwife announced ‘It’s a girl’, the Napoleonic war was still being fought, the motorcar was yet to be invented, and ‘mad’ King George III was on the English throne.

When Mark and I first got together, he told me how everyone in his family, for five generations, had produced boys,’ explains Hannah. ‘He warned me that the chances of us ever having a daughter were pretty remote.’

True to form, when Hannah became pregnant in 2012, no one was surprised when Mason, who’s now three, was born.

Looking back over the family tree, Hannah could see why everyone was so convinced. The last girl to be born in the Lawrie family was Mason’s great-great-great Aunt Bessie, born more than 200 years ago in the same year as Charles Darwin.

Bessie and her brother had had sons, and so the pattern had continued, all the way down to Mark and his brother Glenn. Mark has two other boys, ten-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Zac, from a previous relationship, while Glenn had one son, Reece, who’s 14.

‘I even questioned whether there could be a genetic condition that meant Mark produced only male sperm,’ says Hannah. I asked numerous doctors and consultants in the hospital where I work if this was the case, but was told time and again that it wasn’t. Every time a baby is conceived, the chances of it being a girl are 50/50, they told me — but in Mark’s family, for some reason, it never was.’

Hannah used ovulation kits to work out when she was ovulating. Love-making was allowed only early on in Hannah’s cycle. As soon as the kit showed she was approaching ovulation, intercourse was banned for the rest of the month.Hannah admits it was far from romantic, but says she wanted to give it their best shot.

Hannah fell pregnant straight away but was convinced the technique hadn’t worked and that she was expecting. Then, at the 20-week scan, they received the astonishing news that they were expecting a girl. But it was only when her baby was finally placed on her chest following an emergency Caesarean at 39 weeks, that she truly believed it.”