Allright guys, my eyes have recover.
Continue page 2 --->
Marriages were usually contracted between memebers of the same village, creating smaller groups within the island's population characterized by a higher frequeuency of deafness. The greatest concentration occurred in one viallge on the western part of the island where, by my analysis, within a population of 500, one in every twenty-five individuals was deaf. And even there the disribution was not uniform, for in one area of the village during this time period, one out of every four persons was born deaf.
The high rate of deafness on the island brought only occasional comment from island visitors over the years. Beacause most of the island deaf live in the more remote areas of the island, few off-islanders were aware of their presence. Vineyarders themselves, used to a sizeable deaf members. Almost nothing exists in the written records to indicated who was or was not deaf, and indeed, only a passing reference made by an older islander directed my attention to the fact that there had been any deaf there at all.
While most of my information on island deafness has been obtained from the living oral history of islanders now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties part of my genealogiical data was acquired from the only other study of this deaf population. I came to know of it when an 86 year old woman I was interviewing recalled that her mother had mentioned a "teacher of the deaf from Boston" at one time taking an interest in the island deaf. This "teacher of the deaf" turned out to be Alexander Graham Bell, who, having recently invented the telephone, turned his attention back to his life-long interest in deafness research. Concerned with the question of heredity as it related to deafness, Bell began a major research project in the early 1880's which was never completed.
Nineteenth century scholars, without the benefits of Mendel's concept of unit factor inheretance (which only received widespread circulation at the turn of the centruy, although it had been published in the 1860's), were at a loss to explain why some but not all children of a deaf parent were themselves deaf. Selecting New England because of the older and unusually complete records available, Bell believed that by tracking back the genealogy of every family with two or more deaf children, he could establish some pattern for the inheritance of deafness. He soon found that practicially every family in New England with a history of deafness was in some way connected with the early settlers of Martha's Vineyard, but he was unable to account for the fact that a deaf parent did not always have deaf children and so he abandoned the study. Although Bell never published his material, he left dozens of genealogical charts that have proved invaluable for my research particularly because they corroborate the information I have been able to collect from the oral history of the older islanders.
Since Bells's time, scientists have found through the construction and analysis of family pedigrees and the use of mathematical models, that congenital deafness may result from several causes. Spontaneous mutations involving on or more genes: an already established domenant or recessive inheritance, as Mendel demonstrated: or factors otherwise altering normal development of the ear and its pathways to the brain. Human populations, of course, cannot be studies with the same exactness as a laboratory experiment. However, the appearance of apparently congenitally deaf individuals is far too frewquent on Martha's Vineyard to be more coincidence, and the evidence collected thus far points to a recessive mode of inheritance.
While the genetic nature of the heritary disorder in small population is something that both anthropologists and geneticists have studies , there is another questions, rarely addressed that is of equal importance. How does the population of a community in which a hereditary disorder exists adjust to that disorder particularly one as prominent as deafness? in modern society the emphasis has been on having "handicapped" individuals adapt to the greater society. but the perception of a handicap, with its associated physical and socail limitations, is tempered by the community in which it is found. The manner it which the deaf of Martha's Vineyard were treated provideds an interesting example of how one community responded to his type of situation. "How," I asked my informants, "were the island deaf able to communicate with you when they could not speak?" "Oh", I was told, "therewas no problem at all. You see, everyone here spoke sign language."
From the late seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, islanders, particularly those from the western section where the largest numbers of deaf individuals lived, maintained a bilingual speech community based on spoken English and sign language. What is of particular interest is that the use of sign language played an important role in day to day life.
Islanders acquired a knowledge of sign language in childhood. They were usually taught by parents, with further reinforcement coming from the surrounding community, both hearing and deaf. For example, recalling how she learned a particular sign, one elderly woman explained.
When I was a little girl, I knew many of the signs and the manual alphabet of course, but I didn't know how to say "Merry Christmas." So I asked Mrs. M., his wife. She could hear and she showed me how. And so I wished Mr. M., "Merry Christmas" and he was just so delighted.
Continue -----> tmw page 3.
