UNGRADED

VOLUME VII

JANUARY, 1922

NUMBER 4

Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, Albany, N. Y., March 7, 1981

Signed articles are not to be understood as expressing the views of the editors or publishers

THE TRIBE OF ISHMAEL: A STUDY IN CACOGENICS* ARTHUR H. ESTABROOK, Eugenics Record Office, Carnegie Institution of Washington

In 1888, the Reverend Oscar C. McCulloch read a paper at the meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections at Buffalo, presenting a diagram where thirty different family groups of paupers had been traced covering about two hundred and fifty different families or households. He says, "The central family-that which gives its name to the Tribe of Ishmael-first appears in Indianapolis about 1840. The original family stem, of which we have scant records as far back as 1790, is then in Kentucky, having come from Maryland through Pennsylvania. John Ishmael married a half breed woman and came to Marion county, Indiana, about 1840. He was diseased and could go no further. Three of his sons married three sisters from a pauper family named Smith. Since that time the family has had a pauper record. They have been in the almshouse, the House of Refuge, the Womans' Reformatory, the penitentiaries and have received continuous aid from the township. They are intermarried with the other members of this group and with two hundred and fifty other families. In this family history are murders, a large number of illegitimacies and prostitutes. They are generally diseased. The children die young. They live by petty stealing, begging, ash-gathering. In the summer they 'gypsy' or travel in wagons east or west. In the fall they return. They have been known to live in hollow trees or the river bottoms or in empty houses."

* Read before the Section on Eugenics and the Human Family of the Second International Eugenics Congress, September, 1921, N. Y. C.

McCulloch died and the work was dropped until taken up by the Eugenics Record Office in 1915 and continued to the present with the exception of the time spent by the United States in the World War.

The present investigation has shown that the different families of the tribe came to Indiana mainly through Kentucky and southern Ohio from the Atlantic seaboard, especially Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. The line of travel was either through the Cumberland Gap or by the Potomac river, the mountains and the Ohio river. Part of the population of those areas in colonial times was composed of convicts and paupers and lewd persons brought to this country from England to rid that country of its undesirable classes. Some of the family names of the tribe families are found among the lists of convicts coming to the United States and a few of these names are so uncommon as to render the connection between these convicts and the present tribe entirely probable, although no lineage connections have been made due to absence of any records.

It is estimated that the tribe numbered six thousand people in 1885, coming from about four hundred family heads. Today no estimate of the number of Ishmaels can be made because many of the lines of descent have been lost and so cannot be traced, but the number would not be less than ten thousand. They are now found mainly in Indiana, Kentucky, Tillinois, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Kansas.

There are three outstanding characteristics of the members of the tribe; pauperism, licentiousness and gypsying. Cases could be cited endlessly where families for generation after generation have been professional beggars and paupers, receiving both public and private relief. The names of these families are found year after year on the township trustee books. In the same way the professional beggars tour the town both in the residential and the business districts with always a pitiful tale, which never bears investigation, sometimes the eyes washed with bluestone water to make them inflamed and the individual claiming blindness, or an injury to the hand or foot, kept irritated for months as a plea for help and an excuse for unemployment. There is hardly a family in the tribe that has not had some beggars; in many of the families almost all the members are adept in the art of begging and have plied their trade for

years. The amount of money and help thus secured by begging and from the township trustee and other sources for these paupers far exceeds anything given to the Jukes or the Nams. No estimate of this can ever be made. When the struggle for existence has been too hard often the members of the tribe have been given care in poor asylums or other institutions of a like nature. It has not been uncommon for three generations of a family to be in the poor house at the same time.

Licentiousness is perhaps the next interesting trait which has characterized the tribe. Many of the Ishmaels had no comprehension of or respect for the marriage vows and so their consorts were left or changed at will. One example of this will indicate the extent to which it existed in one family even though this is an extreme case. Four members of one fraternity, one man and three women, each had respectively, six, five, five and seven marriages or matings; in no case death causing a separation, no divorce actions completed and only about half the matings accompanied by a marriage ceremony. A daughter of the woman who had seven marriages was herself a prostitute, married ten times, several of these by ceremony-no divorce between any two marriages.

The other marked characteristic of the tribe has been the wandering or "gypsing" as it is called by the Ishmaelites. The earliest known of these "American gypsies," as they were called, was John Ishmael who had come to Indianapolis from Kentucky about 1825. In the next few years he made several gypsy trips toward the Ohio river and Cincinnati. As this country became settled these trips turned to the north part of Indiana into the Indian reservations. These reservations covered over fifteen hundred square miles and were open only to Indians, but these gypsies, more numerous in number by this time, seem to have been permitted at all times to enter them to hunt and fish. Here these people gypsied during the summer months returning to Indianapolis for the winter months. After 1845, northern Indiana was being settled rapidly and the Indians were gradually being pushed from the reservations. The gypsyings therefore ceased in this direction and started out again in a land less highly developed. This time the route was to the plains of Illinois and some times as far as Iowa and Kansas. Sometimes a family did not return to Indianapolis

for the winter and then it was most often spent in some county poor asylum as the asylum records in various counties in Illinois and Iowa show.

These gypsy trips were generally in wagons, but sometimes on foot. Often several "wagons" would go in a party. They camped in creek bottoms, near a settlement if possible, and lived off the country begging or stealing. When they became tired of a place or, as often, were told to move on by the people who could no longer stand their depredations, they traveled on to another place to do the same again. The residents along these regular routes still remember the gypsies though they can call few by name. At the first approach of cold weather the wagons were turned towards Indianapolis and they hurried back so as to get located in the city before winter set in and, as it has been expressed "to get their names on the trustee's books before frost appeared."

Such is the picture roughly and briefly of the Tribe of Ishmael. The individuals in this large group of feeble-minded folk are continuing to mate like to like and are reproducing their own kind. Some few branches of the tribe have mated into better stocks, but these are so few that they are hardly noticeable. The few placed in orphans' homes and new environments have in some cases done better, but this has not changed the whole mass to any extent. The greater portion are still the cacogenic folk as found by McCulloch and are breeding true to the type. These germ plasms have now spread through the whole middle west and are continuing to spread the anti-social traits of their germ plasm with no check by society. The story of the Tribe of Ishmael is but another picture of the Kallikaks, the Nams and the Jukes.