On May 28, 1934, Oliva and Elzire Dionne of Corbeil, Ontario became the parents of five tiny baby girls: Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie. Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe helped deliver the premature babies, who together weighed about 13.6 pounds. The identical quintuplets were the first quintuplets in the world to survive more than a few days. News of the miracle babies soon spread to newspapers around the globe.

The Dionne quintuplets on a train trip, 1939. (Library and Archives Canada/PA-122615)

Oliva Dionne was a poor French-Canadian farmer. His wife Elzire was twenty-five when the quintuplets were born--and already the mother of six other children. Dr. Dafoe soon took charge of the babies, the Ontario government secured guardianship, and the Dionne quintuplets were moved to the Dafoe Hospital and Nursery. The girls grew up in a compound, away from their family. For nine years the quintuplets lived in a sort of theme park know as "Quintland", to which about three million tourists came to observe them through a one-way screen. The little girls became a major visitor attraction for the province of Ontario, bringing in an estimated $250 million dollars per year in today's dollars (The Dionnes by Ellie Tesher).

Oliva and Elzire Dionne eventually regained custody of the quintuplets, but the large family continued to face many challenges. As the sisters would later write in the book We Were Five, "There was so much more money than love in our existence. It took a long time to realize what it did to us all." For the most famous children in the world, it was not easy to find happiness. Emilie died in 1954 during an epileptic seizure, and Marie died in 1979. The three remaining sisters lived on a small trust fund and eventually managed to force the Ontario government to compensate them for the many years that the quints were on public display for tourists.

• Canada's Dionne quintuplets born 75 years ago
  Article from CTV.ca.
• Dionne Quintuplet Digitization Project
  A comprehensive site with many digital images of the Dionne Quintuplets, newspaper articles, and a timeline. Partners for this project include The Dionne Quints Museum, North Bay Area Museum, North Bay Public Library and Callander Bay Heritage Museum.
• The Dionne Settlement: Justice at Last
  An online resource guide about the settlement in the Dionne's legal battle. Produced in 1998 for Comprehensive News in Review Study Modules. Includes background information and various viewpoints about the case, as well as suggestions for discussion, research and essay questions. From CBC.
  
• North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce
  A brief profile about the Dionne Quintuplets and information about The Dionne Quints Museum.