???? Q drops were so nice to see
???? And hopefully we get to see
???? Moar
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Chilmark fishermen Christopher Murphy approached medical anthropologist Nora Groce after her delivery of the last Nathan Mayhew Seminars lecture of the summer Thursday night, and recalled a remnant of sign language use by old-timers he used to work for.
The news came as pleasant confirmation to Miss Groce, who has spent the better part of the last six years tracing the origins of a community of deaf people who lived pretty much like - and in harmony with - the hearing populace of the Vineyard from its earliest settlement through the 19th century.
“It’s a model of another way human beings can adapt to a handicapped - rather, a disabling - condition,” Miss Groce said Thursday.” A disability isn’t a problem unless people make it a problem. What’s unique about the Vineyard is this adaptation to deafness.”
Not only the deaf people adapted, Miss Groce has concluded from her years of research, years which yielded a book that soon will be available in Island bookstores. The isolated Vineyard offered a haven of sorts for the descendants of a group of English settlers who came here in the mid-1700s and became, like the original Mayhews and Flanderses and Tiltons, founding families. Many of their hearing neighbors communicated comfortably with them in sign language. The difference is that these immigrants brought along an inherited strain of deafness that lasted several generations, Miss Groce said.
“What I was dealing with was a traveling gene pool,” Miss Groce said. She is not the first to follow this trail; an elocution professor from Boston first spotted a pattern of deafness in students at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Conn., and traced it to Vineyard ancestors. But the teacher wearied of the search, possessed of the Victorian conviction that the deafness must be snuffed out, starting with the nonverbal language of the afflicted and concluding with the prevention of procreation of deaf people.
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/1985/08/20/expert-traces-vineyard-story-deaf-and-their-community
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/1884/08/22/deaf-mutes-vineyard