Thanks to , I have been poring over the newly-released at Ancestry.com – thank goodness I have a membership! I know I’ve already mentioned it on Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.
I’m already finding interesting little tidbits. The Fay family appears in the census and also conducted it (Clinton S. Fay is in it; E.A. Fay conducted it; Gallaudet’s Fay House is named for Helen Fay). Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is in there, as are Melville Ballard (first graduate of Gallaudet University) and John Hotchkiss (our football field is named for him). The Cogswell family is there, of course, with Leelah S. Cogswell having had two marriages. One of her forms says she is 2nd cousin of Alice Cogswell (whose father asked T.H. Gallaudet to go to Europe to study methods of deaf education), and the other indicates that her mother died in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871!
I want to read all the records…it will take a while though. There honestly aren’t that many families in each letter of the alphabet, but they were subdivided by second letters of the last name too. So it will take me a little while to go through them, but it’s FUN. These data could also be used to examine how frequently people who were deaf from birth gave birth to deaf children, and whether late-deafened people gave birth to deaf children too, and…all kinds of fun stuff. I’m a huge nerd.