1 in 48 million: 3 generations of Edmonton family share birthday

An Edmonton family is defying the odds after welcoming its newest addition on Friday. The grandfather, dad and son – three first-born males – all share the same birthday: Sept. 22.

“Two in a row, people think that’s a one off,” said Kevin Rae Werner, who was born in 1959. “But three in a row, that’s getting into high odds.”

“He’s going to be under a lot of pressure to keep the tradition going,” Lucas Leslie Werner, who was born in 1992, said about his newborn son.

Lucas Werner and Brianna Ey welcomed their son Cooper Rae Gerald Werner into the world at 3:04 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 22, 2017 at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital. They said they weren’t planning on having a baby when they found out Ey was pregnant.

“I think it’s just so crazy because none of it was planned… we weren’t even planning on having a baby yet and then ‘bam,'” Ey said. “It’s so much love in one day. Plus you get to celebrate the life of three people that are so important to you and each other.”

Cristina Anton, a mathematics and statistics professor at MacEwan University, said the likelihood of three people sharing a specific birthday is about one in 48 million.

“It’s amazing. Some magic happened there. The probability is very, very low,” Anton said. “It’s rare.

“If we fix the date, that date – Sept. 22 – for all of them, the total number of possible birthdays for this group of three people is huge. It’s 365 x 365 x 365. This will give us a very small percentage.”

“If you are in a room with 100 people and you ask yourself, ‘What is the chance that at least two people have the same birthday?’ If we calculate this, we get almost one,” Anton explained.

“If we increase the group of people that we are considering, the chance to get at least two of them with the same birthday increases drastically. But since we only have three of them here, it’s quite rare.”

Anton’s calculation does not take into account the 1992 leap year.