214 



The Journal of Heredity 



research men who are spending their 

 lives in experiments to find out just 

 how the hereditary machinery' works. 



The creation of better famihes is 

 acknowledged to he an important step 

 in the building of a better race, but this 

 involves their starting by the union 

 of good human stocks. May not the 

 development of Genetic Portrait Charts 

 arouse that interest in the family which 

 must come before we can expect the 

 creation of these better families and 

 through them of the better race? 



As pointed out in this Journal b\- 

 Mr. Alexander (iraham Bell "one cer- 

 tain means of increasing the prevalence 

 of any hereditary characteristic in a 

 community is to induce the individuals 

 who possess it to marry one another." 

 "The moment we have a body of desir- 

 able i)ersons whose parents were also 

 desirable, impro\ement of the race 

 begins through the marriage of such 

 persons with the normal population: 

 for the proportion of desirable offspring 

 born from the normal partners will be 

 greater than in cases where the desir- 

 able partner had no ancestors belong- 

 ing to the desirable class. 



"The improxement will be still 

 greater when we have a body of desir- 

 able {jersons who had grandparents as 

 well as parents desirable; and still 

 greater with each increase in the num- 

 i)er of desirable ancestors." 



RELATIVE IXFLUENCE OF THE 

 ANCESTORS 



Inasmuch as one can read character 

 in photographs and we have become 

 very expert in doing this — for we have 

 studied human faces all our lives — the 

 grouping of all one's ancestors permits 

 of a valuable comparison. 



The proper arrangement places the 

 man on the left side and the woman 

 on the right, which throws all of the 

 male ancestors into one line and the 

 female ancestr)rs into another for quick 

 comi)arison. By looking to the right 

 of Mrs. Fairchild, for exami)le, there 

 appear her mother, grandmother, and 

 great grandmother in a straight line of 

 descent. Each ancestor stands directly 

 imder his or her parents and the whole 



relationship of all the ancestors is 

 evident at a glance. Naturally, if such 

 a thi, ^ were possible, the ideal arrange- 

 ment vould be to have all of the photo- 

 graphs taken at the same age, say at 

 40, and from the same view. 



By giving the data available as to 

 the bodily characters of each ancestor 

 which are known to be heritable, a 

 more or less clear picture is obtainable 

 of the stock from which the living 

 representative has come. 



That such photographs should inter- 

 est a wide circle of people directly is 

 evident on second thought, for the 

 ancestry is that common to all the 

 children of a family, for example, and 

 all the children and grandchildren of 

 those children. For example, my own 

 ancestral photographs are common to 

 four other children of my parents, 

 fourteen grandchildren and two great 

 grandchildren, or twenty people in all, 

 whereas Mrs. Fairchild 's ancestral 

 photographs picture the ancestors of 

 nine children. Together they should 

 be of interest to twenty-nine persons 

 besides the four living persons whose 

 photographs appear among them. 



This method of arranging ancestral 

 photographs is capable of considerable 

 expansion. It is true, for example, 

 that in order to give as complete a 

 picture as possible of the variations in 

 the stock, photographs of all the 

 brothers and sisters of both parents 

 should be shown, since it is from a 

 union of these two stocks that the 

 children came. Children are aliuost 

 as likely to resemble uncles or aunts 

 as to resemble their own parents, and 

 in a chart of this character the uncles 

 and aunts should appear in the same 

 scale as do the photographs of the 

 parents. 



A further refinement of the photo- 

 graphic chart would rejiresent the 

 l)rothers and sisters of the grand- 

 parents and e\t'n the great grand- 

 parents, which a<ldilions would make 

 as complete a picture as possible of the 

 family stocks which through their 

 various unions have made the partic- 

 ular combination of characters seen 

 in th^ li\ iiig descendants. 



