5 Generations Greet the Birth of Danielle : Motherhood: Rhonda Angulo, 16, had an ancestral rooting section as she gave birth to her daughter.

Five generations of Williams mothers welcomed the newest member of their family line--little Danielle Angulo--into the world Saturday night.

Three of them--the baby’s grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother--waved to Danielle from the window of a nursery room. Danielle’s mother, 16-year-old Rhonda Angulo of Westminster, nursed her newborn in between rests in her room at Humana Hospital-Huntington Beach.

The family’s matriarch--Danielle’s 96-year-old great-great-great-grandmother, Anna Williams--was too ill to fly out from her home in Indiana but sent her love anyway and a photo of herself to include in a family snapshot taken Sunday.

The nurse who cared for Rhonda Angulo found the family gathering incredible.

“I was surprised to realize that one was the patient’s grandmother and another the mother of the grandmother. I really thought they were just sisters,” Ellen Salvatierra said Sunday. “I was emotionally touched and felt very close to them because rarely do you see (five) generations like that.”

The Williamses are a close family, and those women who live in Southern California stay in regular contact with each other by phone, sometimes getting together for lunch after several attend Sunday services at the Crystal Cathedral.

“Everybody just gets along,” Rhonda Angulo said softly from her hospital room. “Nobody really fights with each other because there’s nothing to fight about.”

For months before the delivery, they spoke excitedly among themselves about the arrival of the family’s sixth living generation. They had expected to gather for a baby shower in Rhonda Angulo’s home Saturday on the day before Mother’s Day, the first-time mother said.

But those plans were scotched when labor began early Saturday, three weeks ahead of schedule. Rhonda was admitted to the hospital at about 8:15 a.m.

An hour or two later, the older women of the family began arriving at the hospital waiting room one at a time: Angulo’s mother, Phyllis Bennett, 37, of Westminster; her grandmother, Marie Smith, 58, of Hemet, and her great-grandmother, Ethel Moon, 80, of Huntington Beach.

“Just the day before, I took my mom out for Mother’s Day. I was telling her, ‘I wish I could have my baby before Mother’s Day,’ ” Angulo said. “I didn’t know everybody was going to show up. . . . I felt very happy.”

On Saturday afternoon, while Angulo’s husband of five months, Matt, coached her through the delivery, the three older mothers paced back and forth, worried about how the teen-ager would do.

“It was kind of neat that they came into the room afterward,” said Matt Angulo, a 22-year-old construction worker. “You just had to be there to see how extraordinary it really was.”

High blood pressure runs in the family, and Rhonda Angulo was warned by doctors that having a baby might endanger her life.

At one point, doctors considered a Cesarean section because the labor was not proceeding fast enough, Salvatierra said. But at 8:45 p.m. Danielle arrived without surgery, weighing 6 pounds and 13 ounces.

“I was happy but scared for her too,” Rhonda Angulo’s mother admitted. “Before she got married, the doctors said she couldn’t have any kids. She would die. . . . I guess the doctors were wrong.

“We don’t have any secrets,” Phyllis Bennett said.

“We’re just a tightknit family. . . . They’re happy, they’re proud. It’s too bad my great-grandmother couldn’t be with us.”