The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry by Harlan Lane;Richard C. Pillard;Ulf Hedberg

Author:Harlan Lane;Richard C. Pillard;Ulf Hedberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-16T09:54:00+00:00

Figure 1 Thomas Brown portrait. Courtesy, Gallaudet University Archives.

To the best of our knowledge, the Brown - Swett - Sanders clan of Henniker was one of only two early American Deaf founding families in the northeast. By "founding," we understand three or more consecutive generations of Deaf people, starting before 1800.1

We use the term clan to refer to a group of Deaf lineages linked by Deaf marriage. We make the presumption, for which there is often evidence, that the Deaf members share a signed language and "feel knit to one another."2 We have made the case in Part I that common ancestry is not necessary for kinship; Deaf people are kin based on a shared physical trait, shared language and culture, and diffuse enduring solidarity. However, the members of many Deaf clans do share ancestry, as was the case with the BrownD clan. Thomas BrownD s grandfather, also named Thomas, lived in Stow, Massachusetts, with his wife, eight daughters, and a son, NahumD-the first Deaf-mute in the family, as far as anyone knew. (See Fig. 2, BrownD Pedigree.) In the figures, circles stand for females, squares for males, diamonds for multiple children, filled symbols for Deaf, and open symbols for hearing. See Appendix C, Pedigree Methods, for details.)3 The progenitor of this Brown family in America, Thomas Browne, left Suffolk County in England and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts4 His grandson, Jabez, moved to Stow where son Joseph was born. Joseph's son, Thomas Brown, was born and raised in Stow, where he took up the trade of blacksmith and, in 1763, married Persis Gibson. The Gibson line originated in the United States with John Gibson, who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1634; his birthplace in England is not known.

In 1785 Thomas Brown fled Stow with his family to Henniker, New Hampshire, a virtual wilderness some hundred miles away. It seems that Thomas had contracted a hard-currency debt that he was unable to pay. At the time of the Revolution, the colonial states printed their own money, "fiat money," not backed by coin. Too much of this money was printed, and Thomas's money lost its value. According to his son, NahumD, he once took a bushel of fiat money and dumped it into a grain bin in the attic .5 Increasingly lenders wanted repayment in British gold, pounds, or other hard currency. Fearing debtors' prison, Thomas set out for Henniker where his wife's family, former residents of Stow, had moved. Henniker is located on the Contoocook River; the early settlers would have been drawn there by the numerous large ponds teeming with fish, the dense forests with abundant game, the large meadowlands and waterfalls that could be harnessed to power mills.

On arriving, Thomas made a clearing and built a log cabin, which stood for nearly a century and was known as the Brown House. Then, according to one account, he sent word to NahumD (it is not clear how, at a distance, he would have instructed his thirteen-year-old Deaf son

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.