In the late 1600’s, an extended family from Weald, England settled on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in New England. The family carried a strong hereditary deafness gene, and as they married and intermarried, the rate of deaf people born on the island rose steadily. By the 1700’s almost everyone on the island had a deaf family member or two. Because of the high rate of deafness, the society on the island was completely different from mainstream, mainland society.
Mainland New England at this time was generally a terrible place for deaf people to live. Many people believed that deafness was a punishment from God. While the families of deaf children may have developed home signs, mainstream society could not understand these rudimentary signs, usually only good for expressing basic needs and requests, and different from home to home. Scholars debated about whether a deaf person could reason and learn like a hearing person. There were almost no career opportunities for deaf adults. The best they could hope for was to be trained to do manual labor for someone else’s business.
The prospects for deaf people on Martha’s Vineyard were completely different. Many of the former residents of the island were interviewed, and they paint an idyllic picture of what it was like to live in Martha’s Vineyard during this time. Because everyone had a deaf family member, everyone in the community knew sign language. Deaf people were farmers, store clerks, anything they wanted to be. Hearing people would sign to each other over the large expanses the island farms created, a deaf person could walk into a store and the clerk would always know sign. Deaf people were even elected to high political office, becoming mayors and council members for the island, a thing unheard of in the rest of the country. When telling stories about the community, the people who were being interviewed could only remember after much prompting if the people they were talking about were hearing or deaf.
The rare deaf/hearing equality experienced in Martha’s Vineyard is still remarkable today. In a society where hearing people are ignorant about deaf issues and can be very rude, a place like Martha’s Vineyard seems particularly wonderful. The equality that was shared by everyone, and the prejudices about deaf people that didn’t exist, make the little island community seem like the perfect place. Many deaf people consider it the ultimate utopia.
Ironically, the opening of the first deaf school in Hartford, Connecticut was a big reason why the hereditary deafness on the island petered out. Many deaf people from the island attended the school, met and married other deaf people who’s deafness wasn’t hereditary, and lived and had children near the school on the mainland of New England. As more and more of the population moved away, less and less deaf children were born on the island. In 1952, hereditary deafness died on the island with the death of Katie West. Though the community is gone today, it’s signs live on. Children attending the Hartford school mixed their signs in with the French Sign Language Laurent Clerc brought with him from Paris, creating much of the uniquely beautiful American Sign Language that exists today.
If My Hands Could Speak... 
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April 18, 2011 at 10:18 AM
Shonda
Nice story…Beautiful!
May 8, 2011 at 5:38 PM
Andrea Shettle, MSW
“Many deaf people from the island attended the school, met and married other deaf people who’s deafness wasn’t hereditary, and lived and had children near the school on the mainland of New England.”
Actually, as I understand it, the genetics can get even more complicated than this. It is possible for BOTH parents to have inherited (genetic) deafness and still have hearing children. There are many different recessive genes that can cause deafness, IF the child inherits two copies of the SAME gene (one from each parent). However, if the two parents have completely different genes, then the child may become a carrier of whatever deafness gene the mother gives them and a carrier of whatever deafness gene the father gives them without themselves becoming deaf because the two genes they have inherited are not the same gene. I hope this makes sense. Basically, the gene that caused deafness in Martha’s Vineyard apparently didn’t match up to the various genes that may have caused deafness for some of the students at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford.
There are also a few dominant genes out there that can lead to deafness as well–dominant means you only need one copy of the gene, but there is a 50/50 chance for each of your children that they might not inherit the gene at all.
June 29, 2012 at 7:05 AM
Lance Doucette
@Andrea: While you’re mostly correct, it is possible for a child to inherit two mutations in two different genes which are known to cause hearing loss, and have hearing loss themselves. This phenomenon is known as digenic inheritance, and has been shown in a few deafness cases such as inheriting mutations in CDH23 and PCDH15.
June 30, 2012 at 8:30 AM
Andrea Shettle, MSW
Thank you, Lance, for teaching me a more finely nuanced understanding of inheritance among deaf people. It makes me wonder what the odds are that something like this could be the cause of my own deafness: they did test for the Connection 26 gene (apparently the most common gene that causes deafness in a child in a family where there might not otherwise be any other deaf people) but confirmed that this is not what I have.
Gosh, I had completely forgotten writing this comment more than a year ago until I saw your response pop up in my email!
September 5, 2015 at 10:56 PM
Jenny
I just finished watching a show called “Mysteries at the Museum” with host Don Wildman. It was the 2nd time I had seen this episode, but unfortunately I deleted it now, so I can’t tell you what year it was made, but you could look it up on YouTube and put in the show name and Martha’s Vinyard. It’s at the end of the show.
Anyway, they discussed MV, and the great number of hearing impaired people there vs. in other places. They said that Alexander Grahm Bell had once been very interested in the island and wanted to find out if it was a hereditary thing or not.
He was given the hundreds of years of genealogy, and studied it, and they said that they found that the one man who had moved there from France (with his wife I presume) had been deaf, but it was not genetic from his previous ancestors. Or something like that.
But they just said that it was an odd coincidence, just as was determined it was, with the great number of twins in a tiny town in Brazil There, it was believed, until recently that these twins were created by one of the Worst men in WWII, Josef Mengele, who was obsessed with working with and studying identical twins at Auschwits, one of the worst concentration camps. Cause after the war, he disappeared and was found to be in South America. But after many studies, they were thankful to find that it wasn’t him.
So I wanted to read more about it, and now I’m confused. LOL