The "Deafness In The Vineyard" Story

Logo used on my favorite show on the Travel Channel

It was an ordinary day.  Watching one of my favorite TV shows, Mysteries at the Museum, which features Don Wildman who visits museums around the world and picks one item in the museum and tells a tale about the item.  Now who wouldn't love a tale of deceit, destruction, war, love, death or even someone who was deaf!  One of the segments on the show I watched today talked about a deaf Utopia where everyone would know how to communicate in sign language.  Well, there actually was a place such as that off the coast of Massachusetts on the small island known as Martha's Vineyard.  

The island of Martha's Vineyard.

You've heard of the island I assume.  One of the greatest scary movies of my lifetime, Jaws, the story about a great white shark who closed the beaches in Martha's Vineyard, made the island well known.  But, evidently, the island is just as well known for being an island with a high deaf population at one point in time.  It was in the 19th century that the Vineyard population began to grow with deaf people.  In 1817 two families had deaf members with a total of seven deaf.  Ten years later the number had risen to 11 deaf.  Then in 1850 the small town of Chilmark had 17 deaf in six households.  Five more years showed 21 deaf in nearby Tisbury.  

The cover of a book that has been written
dealing with the deafness on Martha's Vineyard.

In Chilmark there were 19 more deaf.  On the nearby mainland in Massachusetts the frequency of deafness was 1 in 6,000 while on the Vineyard it was 1 in 155 people with Chilmark leading the way with 1 in 25 with a section of the town called Squibnocket having 1 in 4 deaf.   For much of my adult life after the 1970s I too had a small degree of deafness, but that was due to coaching the rifle team at the high school where I taught and not knowing I should be wearing ear protection.  My loss has been corrected with hearing aides, but in the case of the people on the Vineyard, they suffered a type of deafness at birth that was of the nerve type and couldn't be corrected with medical or mechanical means as mine was.  Many of the early settlers on Martha's Vineyard carried a gene for deafness and through marriage, generation after generation, their children were born with hearing loss.  There were so many deaf people on the vineyard that the residents developed a sign language called Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) or Chilmark Sign Language which has its roots in County Kent in southern England.  MVSL seems to have had a role in the American Sign Language when residents began attending the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.  

The sign language known as MVSL.

Children with deafness received a longer education on the Vineyard due to their hearing loss.  This led to a higher literacy rate among deaf students.  As children and young adults married and moved off the island, the deaf population of the Vineyard decreased.  The last deaf Vineyard native died in the 1950s.  Today there are no fluent signers of MVSL.  There are still a few residents of Martha's Vineyard today that can still remember the use of sign language.  Seems that linguists are working to try and save the rare language, but the lack of use anymore is making it very difficult.  As for me, I seem to learn something new every time I watch Don Wildman of Mysteries at the Museum.  Shows you that you're never too old to learn.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.