Charles Vance Millar was a wealthy Toronto lawyer famous for elaborate pranks, and when he died suddenly in 1926, his final will read like the strangest joke he had ever pulled on the city he loved.
Millar left his enormous fortune to whichever Toronto woman gave birth to the most children in the decade after his death, a clause his lawyers assumed was another one of his jokes.
Nobody believed the will was real until lawyers confirmed it was legally binding, and suddenly dozens of Toronto families realized they were unintentionally competing for a small fortune.
The press dubbed it the Great Stork Derby, and newspapers tracked pregnant contestants like racehorses, publishing updates on births as though covering a sporting event.
Some contestants had children out of wedlock, sparking legal battles over whether those births should count, while other relatives tried suing to overturn the will entirely.
In 1938, four women were declared joint winners after each delivered nine babies in the ten-year window, splitting roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars equally.
The case became a landmark in Canadian inheritance law, and Millar's morbid sense of humor ended up quietly funding dozens of children who owed their comfortable lives to his final prank.
