Family toasts first baby girl in 130 years

The parents of newborn baby Rebecca Clint were celebrating an extra- special delivery yesterday, after she became the first girl to be born into the family in over 130 years.

Mechanic Colin Clint and his wife Rachel, of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, ended the family tradition when Rebecca was born two weeks prematurely, weighing 8lbs 6oz. The last 10 births in the Clint family, spread over five generations, have all been boys. Ladbrokes have estimated the odds of ten males being born to one family as 1,024-1.

Rachel Clint, 24, who has a six-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, always suspected that the baby would be a girl. "When I first got pregnant, everyone in Colin's family was saying it was going to be a boy because it couldn't be anything else. We came up with the name Craig in case she was a boy. But it just didn't sound right.

"Every time the baby kicked me, Colin would say 'That's my boy' even though I kept saying she was a girl."

A scan at 20 weeks showed that the baby would be a girl. But Colin, also 24, remained unconvinced. "Scans are never 100 per cent, and I still didn't believe it."

The last girl to be born in the family was Fanny Clint, born in Liverpool in the 1860s. Baby Rebecca's grandmother, June Clint, 53, puts the lack of girls in the family partly down to the fact that her husband's grandfather and great-grandfather only had one son each, in a time when large families were commonplace.