The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (20 page)

Thomas BrownD died March 23, 1886.

We will return to an examination of the Henniker Deaf enclave in order to contrast it with Deaf lives on Martha's Vineyard, to which we turn now.

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Mary SmithD no doubt found her life quite changed after she married Thomas BrownD, left the Vineyard, and took up residence on the mainland in the intensely Deaf Henniker enclave, far from her hearing family and numerous relatives and friends on the island. She decided to take with her some remembrances of her island home-a whalebone; some beautiful big seashells; and shark teeth with scrimshaw sailor carvings on them.' MaryD and ThomasD's descendants would have the combined Deaf heritage of the Vineyard, some six generations deep at that time, and of the Henniker Deaf enclave, merely a generation old. Mary SmithD is representative of numerous Deaf young men and women who grew up on the Vineyard, attended the American Asylum, married a Deaf schoolmate, and created a family with Deaf and hearing children. Mary SmithD is also representative in that she could trace her ancestry, as could virtually all Deaf people on the Vineyard, to just a few settlers.

VINEYARD LINEAGES

In the following we present our pedigrees for all the major Vineyard Deaf families.2 Before turning to Mary SmithD s pedigree, a word is needed here on how these pedigrees were made (see Pedigree Methods, Appendix Q. We analyzed the information in Fay's Marriages of the Deaf in America, Bell's unpublished notebooks, federal censuses, and Banks' History of Martha's Vineyard, among numerous other sources listed in the endnotes. Each pedigree gives the descendants of the named progenitor who are in the line of descent to a Deaf person. Off-island Deaf descendants of Vineyard dwellers were included.

To prepare the Vineyard pedigrees below, we first identified, as far as possible, all the Deaf people and their relations on Martha's Vineyard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because intermarriage was so extensive on the Vineyard, often we could not be sure who were the cousins or other relatives of a given Deaf person; consequently, this first stage was as inclusive as possible. Then in the second stage the inclusive group was pruned: we retained only the Deaf people, their ancestors, their descendants, and their siblings-no one else. All of the pedigrees presented in this book appear with more details at our website, http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/DEA, where the reader will also find pedigrees for numerous additional families with Deaf members.

A pedigree for Mary SmithD appears in Fig. 3. (Tilton pedigree; see arrow. Also see Fig. 6.) Mary SmithD's mother, Sarah (Sally) Cottle, was hearing; she was the daughter of Silas Cottle and Jerusha TiltonD. Jerusha D s mother and father (MaryD s great-grandparents) were cousins (note the double bar indicating consanguinity).3 They were both descendants of the island's first governor, Thomas Mayhew. JerushaDs great-grandfather was Samuel Tilton, the progenitor of the Tiltons on the Vineyard. Samuel Tilton's father had emigrated from Warwickshire, England, to Lynn, Massachusetts, where Samuel was born. As a young man, Samuel learned the trade of carpenter and, after his father's death, moved with his mother and siblings to his step-father's home in Hampton, New Hampshire, where he married. In 1673, he moved his family to the Vineyard. The five Deaf Tiltons identified in the pedigree, with common descent from Samuel, are all children of consanguineous marriages and all have a Mayhew ancestor in addition.

Governor Thomas Mayhew and his family came from Wiltshire, England, to Medford, Massachusetts, in 1631 (see Fig. 4, Mayhew pedi- gree).4 He worked as a business representative and merchant, bought an interest in a mill, and held various local offices. After moving to Watertown, one of the earliest of the Massachusetts Bay settlements, Mayhew bought Martha's Vineyard in 1641 from the two patentees under royal charter then disputing ownership of the island; he moved there six years later. The Mayhews intermarried so extensively with other families and their Deaf descendants were so numerous-thirtyeight counted here-that the pedigree is large and complex. The governor's son, Matthew, married Mary Skiffe in 1674; her family was from Kent. The Mayhew sibship in the eleventh generation is noteworthy for having four hearing and five Deaf members. Three of the siblings and their sister-in-law were members of the NEGA. (A sibship is a set of siblings, children of the same parents.)

Because the Tiltons early intermarried with the Skiffes, MaryD was also descended from James Skiffe, a native of Kent who came to America on the Mayflower (see Fig. 5, Skiffe pedigree) and settled in Sandwich, Massachusetts.5 His son, James, purchased land on the Vineyard in 1669, settled in Tisbury, and sold the remaining tracts there to friends. (Edgartown in the east part of the island, Tisbury in the central part, and Chilmark in the west, were the three predominant settlements.)

Mary SmithD s father was Mayhew Smith (Fig. 6, Smith-Parkhurst pedigree, see arrow).6 Her paternal grandfather, Elijah Smith, married a Mayhew; he was descended from the Smith progenitor, John, who was born in Hampton, England, and died in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1639. His son, also named John, moved to Edgartown, Massachusetts, on the Vineyard, in 1653. Mary SmithD had eight hearing siblings and an older sister, SallyD, who also attended the American Asylum. SallyD married a hearing cousin, Hariph Mayhew, who had six Deaf brothers and sisters. MaryD's brother, Captain Austin Smith, married Levina Poole-the two had a shared ancestor in Samuel Tilton (Fig. 3). They had two hearing children and two Deaf. One of their Deaf children, FreemanD, married a Deaf cousin-Deidama WestD (see Fig. 7, Lambert pedigree). DeidamaD had four Deaf siblings and three hearing. DeidamaD s parents (mother, Deaf; father, hearing) were distant cousins, both descended from Governor Thomas Mayhew, and her father was descended from the first recorded Deaf person on the island, Jonathan LambertD.7

LambertD was a carpenter, who had arrived from Barnstable about 1692. Although early Vineyard immigrants were from the Boston area, late in the 1600s many, like LambertD, came from lower Cape Cod towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Falmouth. A Jonathan Lambert was master of the Brigantine Tyral and had served under Sir William Phips, Royal Governor of Massachusetts, in an expedition to Quebec in 1690.8 A Jonathan LambertD, presumably the same person, left a will that reveals him to be relatively wealthy and literate and the father of two Deaf children.9 In the following excerpt, spelling errors have been retained.

Being arrived to old age but of suitable mind and memory to dispose as hereafter the goodness of my God, calling to mind the mortality of my body, do mak and ordain this my last will and testament. [I leave] to Elizabeth my beloved wife the use and improvement of all whatsoever I leave in the world....

I leave to my loving son Jonathan, half of my meadow at Felix Neck in Edgartown and also half a shear in the commons of the town of Tisbury. I give to my loving son and daughter, EbenezerD and BeulaD, the other half of that meadow ... together with half of my hous (viz. est end) and land hear at home and also two cowes ... [gifts to the other four children] ... and furthermore, by these presents (considering my two poor children that cannot spake for themselves), I earnestly desire that my son Jonathan and my trusty beloved friend David Butler after the understanding hereof would please as they have opportunity to help them in any lawful way as they shall have need.

March 23, 1737. Witness: Samuel Luce, David Butler, Jonathan Farnum

Evidence that LambertD was Deaf comes from a diary entry of a Boston judge, who was visiting the Vineyard: "We were ready to be offended that an Englishman, Jonathan Lumbard, in the company spake not a word to us, and it seems he is Deaf and Dumb."10 Jonathan LambertD s grandfather, Thomas, was born in Tenderton, Kent, in 1600 and migrated to Scituate, on Cape Cod, in 1630, part of the Great Migration. This progenitor had numerous Deaf descendants on the Vineyard. In the 1700s three of them were children or grandchildren of JonathanD, two by his wife Elizabeth Eddy; her grandfather, Samuel, emigrated from Kent to Barnstable, Massachusetts. She married Jonathan LambertD in 1683 and the couple moved to Tisbury. Deaf Lamberts, Mayhews, and others follow but that is the last we hear of the Eddy name in Deaf ancestry.

Jonathan LambertD s sister, Abigail, had three Deaf grandchildren. Many more Deaf Lambert descendants were born in the following century, stemming from intermarriage with members of the West family in Chilmark.11 The progenitor of the West clan, Francis, moved from Wiltshire, England, where he was a carpenter, to Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1639 (see Fig. 7, Lambert pedigree). His son Thomas, an attorney and doctor-the first physician on the Vineyard-was associated with the Skiffe family and about 1673 he moved to Tisbury. There were no Deaf children in the West clan until after the seventh generation, when Lydia West married her relative, Thomas Lambert in Chilmark; they had a Deaf daughter PrudenceD. Lydia's brother, George West, married his second cousin, Deidama TiltonD. George had ancestors from the Butler family, whose progenitor was Nicholas, and from the Athearn family, whose progenitor was Simon; both progenitors emigrated from Kent. Nicholas Butler and wife have two lines of descent on the Vineyard: son John married Priscilla Norton and settled in Edgartown; daughter Mary married Simon Athearn and settled in West Tisbury.12 Descendants of John and Priscilla intermarried as did those of Simon and Mary but their Deaf descendants are all Mayhews and Wests six and seven generations later.

George West and wife DeidamaD had eight children, five of whom were Deaf. Among the Deaf children, Joseph ("Josie") WestD was reportedly the only illiterate Deaf person in Chilmark. He was a farmer, gardener and axman. His portrait, painted by Thomas Hart Benton, is in the Martha's Vineyard Museum.13 JosieD married a hearing woman and they had no children. JosieD s brother, GeorgeD, a farmer and fisherman, married Sabrina R. Rogers=-she from a large Deaf clan (Fig. 14). The couple had three children, one of whom was Deaf, EvaD; she married a hearing man. Another of JosieDs brothers, BenjaminD married a hearing woman; on her death he married an Asylum graduate like himself, Catherine ("Katie") DolanD.

We find evidence of what it meant to be Deaf on the Vineyard, and how this differed from the views of the general public, in a newspaper article of the day. George West, husband of DeidamaD, when interviewed for a Philadelphia newspaper in 1895, stated that he had thirty-three grandchildren of whom ten were Deaf.14 The reporter comments: "The kindly and well-informed people whom I saw, strange to say, seemed to be proud of the affliction-to regard it as a plume in the hat of the stock... Anyone who should ... offer to wipe out the affliction from the place and to prevent its recurrence, would almost be regarded as a public enemy and not as a benefactor."

A KENTISH ENCLAVE

In his testimony to the Royal Commission of the United Kingdom on the Condition of the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb, Etc., Bell stated that he had identified seventy-two Deaf individuals who had been born on the Vineyard or whose ancestors came from the Vineyard. Of those, thirtytwo had Samuel Tilton as an ancestor, forty-one Governor Mayhew, and sixty-three James Skiffe.15 Most of the island Deaf had all three of these colonists in their pedigrees. Now for a child with hearing parents to be Deaf, in what is called recessive transmission, each parent must pass on the same gene associated with being Deaf. Since there are numerous such genes, when they match we infer that the parents were related-that is, that they had a common ancestor who gave each of them the same gene. However, the known Deaf Vineyarders could not be traced to a single Vineyard ancestor.

In her classic study of the Deaf on Martha's Vineyard, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, anthropologist Nora Groce concludes, then, that the Deaf people on the Vineyard had a common ancestor back in England. In view of the Kentish origins of so many Vineyarders, it was likely their ancestors had lived in Kent, in particular the isolated and forested region of Kent known as the Weald, where inbreeding was common.16 Indeed, by the 1840s, nearly everyone on the Vineyard had two or more Kentish ancestors.'?

Here is how that came to pass. In 1634, a minister named John Lothrop and some two hundred members of his congregation and their servants, all from parishes in the Weald in Kent, arrived in Boston harbor. Lothrop had been born in 1584 in Yorkshire and married a woman of Kent, Hannah House, in 1610. He had served as curate of a church in Kent for five years before becoming a Puritan Separatist in 1623. In so doing, Lothrop joined an outlawed movement that had been strong in Kent since the early 1400s. Nine years later he accepted leadership of a congregation of Separatists in London for which he was promptly imprisoned for two years. On release, he sailed with a portion of his London and Kentish flocks to Boston and then traveled to Scituate, where a new home had been prepared for him and where half the population was from the Weald. Indeed, there was a Kent Street in Scituate, so-called from the many "Men of Kent" who lived there.18 Five years later Lothrop moved with many of his flock to Barnstable, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), and founded a church there, serving as minister of both Scituate and Barnstable.19

In 1670 several of the families in Lothrop's congregation, most from Kent, moved from Barnstable to the Vineyard when James Skiffe, who was from Kent, sold land in the village of Tisbury. In the ensuing decades, more of these families, Tiltons, Lamberts, and others, moved across Vineyard Sound, settling in the Chilmark area.20 Thus, the progenitors of Deaf families on the Vineyard who had emigrated from Kent-James Skiffe, John Smith, and Thomas Lambert-joined by other Kentish settlers from Scituate and Barnstable, combined with extensive intermarriage on the island, created the conditions for an uncommonly large Deaf population there. Groce reports that the ancestries of Deaf Vineyarders almost always lead back to Scituate (the second oldest town in Plymouth Colony). It follows that the pattern of migration was Kent to Scituate, to Barnstable and the Cape Cod area, to Martha's Vineyard. Thus it is very likely that all the Deaf people on Martha's Vineyard, and all their descendants scattered over America right down to the present, have a common ancestor in Kent, the Ur ancestor in whom the original genetic mutation occurred.