Nancy Rowe and George Curtis: Deaf Lives in Maine 150 Years Ago

Abstract

PREVIOUS ACCOUNTS OF EARLY DEAF SETTLEMENT in New England have focused on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (Groce 1985), and on southern New Hampshire (Lane, Pillard, and French 2000). This article is based on some findings in larger project concerned with settlement in Maine. Maine is the site of one of the oldest and largest extended families in the United States: the Lovejoy-Jellison-Berry family (Jones 1996). However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many extended families lived in Maine. Examining the 1850 census, the first government census to identify all of the household members who were Deaf and Dumb, will give us some idea of the number. We retain only those names that are identified as Deaf and and that occur twice, as an approximate way to identify those hereditarily Deaf. Twenty-nine family names occurred at least twice in twentyseven towns. In those families were 113 people, for an average of 3.9 persons per family. Some of these families (those from Martha's Vineyard and others that had come directly from England) had ancestors in Kent, where, Groce (1985) has suggested, recessive gene associated with being was widespread. No doubt other settlers came as the word spread of settlement in Maine, and some no doubt landed there for reasons unrelated to their being Deaf. This article recounts intermarriage and family life in nineteenthcentury extended family in Maine: the Rowes and the Curtises. It draws on letters between Nancy Rowe, George Curtis, and members of their families, letters that have fortunately been preserved (Women in History Project, n.d.) In New Gloucester, Maine, Nancy Rowe (1815-1895) hailed from large family whose ancestors came from Devonshire in England. On immigrating to America, they settled first in Gloucester, Massachusetts. When tract of land in the Maine wilderness (then part of Massachusetts) was granted to the inhabitants of Gloucester in 1735, several families moved there. The town of New Gloucester also received settlers from Martha's Vineyard (Poole 1976). Figure 1 presents the Rowe family with an indication of their ties to the Curtis and Reed families, for whom only members are shown. Nancy Rowe had five brothers and two sisters. She also had five hearing siblings, of whom Nathaniel and two others died in infancy. (Birth and death dates for all Rowe and Curtis names cited in the text appear in table 1.) Nancy's parents were hearing and distantly related. Her paternal grandparents were both Rowes, and one of her mother's ancestors married one of her father's forebears. Thus we infer that Nancy and her seven siblings were because of recessive pattern of transmission. That both of Nancy's parents were hearing is consistent with that hypothesis but the fact that more than half of their children were is not. On average, only one-fourth of the children should express recessive trait. The odds that chance alone explains that there were as many as eight children in this family of thirteen are less than 1 in 100 (chi square = 9.3 p At age thirteen, Nancy entered the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the and Dumb in 1829 and graduated four years later; five of her seven siblings would also be educated there. In 1833 the principal, Lewis Weld, gave her certificate testifying that she had been a pupil of the American Asylum, [and] made good attainments in the knowledge of written language and other branches of common education. When she was twenty-four, Nancy Rowe married George Curtis, from Leeds, Maine, and moved there to live with him. Four children, all hearing, would be born to the couple over the next fifteen years. If George and Nancy were because they both had two copies of the same recessive gene, then all of their children should likewise have been Deaf. That they were not suggests that the parents had different recessive genes. …