Jukes
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Jukes. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
juks, The, a family of New York State, famous in the records of crime and pauperism. In 1874 Mr. R. L. Dugdale, while investigating the prison records of that state, became interested in the repeated recurrence of certain names. On tracing the matter he found that two Jukes sisters, one of them known as Margaret, the Mother of Criminals, married two brothers named Max. He made investigation of the family extending through several generations. He obtained the particulars relative to over 700 of the 1,200 members of the family, all related by blood. He found that of these 140 had been imprisoned for crime, and that 280 had been paupers dependent upon public support. The history of the family is often referred to as an argument against permitting people of low physical and moral standard to marry and bring up families destined to become criminals, or, at best, public charges.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
JOSEPH BEETE, an English geologist; born near Birmingham, Engrmingham, land, Oct. 10, 1811. He was graduated at Cambridge in 1836; in 1839 appointed ; in geological surveyor of Newfoundland 1842 took part as naturalist in the ex- Hot in the exploration and survey of Torres Strait, New Guinea Toast of Australia; surveyed part arth Wales for the Kingdom ( 1846-1850); in 1850 became local director of Pey is Ireland. He wrote " Excursions in and bout Narrative of Newfoundland of H. M. S. 'Fly,' the Surveying Voyage (1847); A in Torres Physical Structure of Aus- Sketch of the cucture of Anstralia" (1850); "Student's Manual of 's Manual of Geology" (1857, 5th ed. 1890); etc. He 1869. 800); etc. Ho died in Dublin, Ireland, July 29, ly 18, 1669. ۱
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the Jukes were treated as settled proof "against permitting people of low physical and moral standard to marry" — the family's own name, and those of "Margaret" and the brothers "Max," were pseudonyms Dugdale invented for his 1877 study. That reading of the case helped drive American eugenics: compulsory sterilization laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), and tens of thousands of people were sterilized before such programmes were abandoned. Modern scholars point out that Dugdale himself gave real weight to environment — poverty, disease, lack of schooling — and that later eugenic writers, notably Arthur Estabrook's The Jukes in 1915, hardened his findings into pure heredity; his statistics are now read as an artefact of following one poor rural kin-network through the courts, not as evidence of inherited criminality. The Jukes today are studied as a landmark in the history of eugenics rather than of genetics. (The Collier's 1921 text on this page is a different subject altogether — the geologist Joseph Beete Jukes.)
Written for this edition, 2026.