by Willow Skidmore
PHS Press staff member
Martha’s
Vineyard is an island off the coast of Massachusetts where most of the
population is deaf or culturally deaf (which means hard of hearing). About.com
says that the first recorded deaf person on Martha’s Vineyard was Jonathan
Lambert in 1692. He and his family came from England and established the first
English settlement on Martha’s Vineyard. Lambert had seven children, two of
whom were deaf.
Many of
the early settlers carried a gene for deafness. This gene started with
Lambert’s family and two other families: The Tiltons and the Skiffes. They
created Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which later mixed with French Sign
Language to create American Sign Language. At one point, one in every four
children on Martha’s Vineyard was deaf .
History
Collections tells us that Alexander Graham Bell noted the large amount of
deafness on Martha’s Vineyard in the late Nineteenth Century after visiting the
island. Previously, people believed
that “maternal fright” was the explanation for this phenomenon. The
theory of “maternal fright” was an effect on the baby from psychological stress
on the mother during pregnancy. Bell thought about this and believed that the
deafness was hereditary. In the Nineteenth Century in America, one in every
5,728 people was deaf, while on Martha’s Vineyard, one in every twenty-five
people was deaf. Hearing people
then and now communicate using sign language while on the island. According to
History Collections, that is why the people of Martha’s Vineyard do not
consider themselves a “deaf community,” but “a community which opens language
barriers.”
