The last family of half brothers and sisters of Deborah are, at present, living with the mother and her second husband. The oldest three of these are distinctly feeble-minded. Between them and the two younger children there was a stillbirth and a miscarriage. The little ones appear normal and test normal for their ages, but there is good reason to believe that they will develop the same defect as they grow older.
Besides the mother of Deborah, Justin and Eunice had ten other children, of whom six died in infancy. One of the daughters, Margaret, was taken by a good family when a very small child. When she was about thirteen, she visited her parents for a few weeks. While her mother was away at work, her father, who was a drunken brute, committed incest with her. When the fact became known in her adopted home, she was placed in the almshouse. The child born there soon died, and she was again received into the family where she formerly lived. The care with which she was surrounded prevented her from becoming a vicious woman. Although of dull mentality, she was a good and cheerful worker. When about thirty-five, she married a respectable workingman but has had no children by him.
Another daughter, Abigail, feeble-minded, married a feeble-minded man by whom she had two feeble-minded children, besides a third that died in infancy. She later married a normal man.
The next child of Justin and Eunice was Beede, who is feeble-minded. He married a girl who left him before their child was born. He lives at present with a very low, immoral woman.
The youngest child of Justin and Eunice was a son, Gaston, feeble-minded and a horse thief; he removed to a distant town where he married. He has one child; mentality of both mother and child undetermined.
This is the ghastly story of the descendants of Martin Kallikak Sr., from the nameless feeble-minded girl.
Although Martin himself paid no further attention to the girl nor her child, society has had to pay the heavy price of all the evil he engendered.
Martin Sr., on leaving the Revolutionary Army, straightened up and married a respectable girl of good family, and through that union has come another line of descendants of radically different character. These now number four hundred and ninety-six in direct descent. All of them are normal people. Three men only have been found among them who were somewhat degenerate, but they were not defective. Two of these were alcoholic, and the other sexually loose.
All of the legitimate children of Martin Sr. married into the best families in their state, the descendants of colonial governors, signers of the Declaration of Independence, soldiers and even the founders of a great university. Indeed, in this family and its collateral branches, we find nothing but good representative citizenship. There are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of social life. They have scattered over the United States and are prominent in their communities wherever they have gone. Half a dozen towns in New Jersey are named from the families into which Martin’s descendants have married. There have been no feeble-minded among them; no illegitimate children; no immoral women; only one man was sexually loose. There has been no epilepsy, no criminals, no keepers of houses of prostitution. Only fifteen children have died in infancy. There has been one “insane,” a case of religious mania, perhaps inherited, but not from the Kallikak side. The appetite for strong drink has been present here and there in this family from the beginning. It was in Martin Sr., and was cultivated at a time when such practices were common everywhere. But while the other branch of the family has had twenty-four victims of habitual drunkenness, this side scores only two.