HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 85 
Jukes family even to a much greater degree than the family in 
general. Estabrook states he was ‘‘able to study many of the 
Jukes criminals of to-day and in every case the individual has 
been proved without a doubt to be feeble-minded. Willett, who 
committed murder; VI 529, a low-grade imbecile who committed 
burglary; Edgar, a rapist; and VI 16, who committed assault, 
are all mental defectives, and in none of these has their criminal 
record biased the writer in diagnosing their mentality. There is 
no evidence in the Jukes which points to the existence of a trait 
of criminality. Not all feeble-minded Jukes are criminal, but all 
the Juke criminals that I have known I regard as mentally 
defective.” 
Another notorious family with a bad record for criminality 
is the Tribe of Ishmael whose history has been followed through 
several generations by the Rev. O. C. McCulloch. The Tribe of 
Ishmael lived in the central part of Indiana where they made 
themselves a general nuisance to their neighbors by furnishing a 
liberal quota of petty thieves, vagrants, paupers, prostitutes, 
and several criminals of a more desperate kind. Many of these 
people lived a gypsy sort of life in the summer. A large propor- 
tion of the pauperism, prostitution and crime in the region in 
which this family lived was traceable to this polluted stock. “‘The 
individuals already traced are over 5,000 interwoven by descent 
and marriage. They underrun society like devil grass. Pick up 
one, and the whole 5,000 would be drawn up. Over 7,000 
pages of history are now on file in the Charity Organization 
Society.” 
Jorger has traced out the remarkable record of the family Zero 
which lived in a Swiss valley since the beginning of the 17th 
century. The family early divided into three branches, two 
of which consisted of law-abiding citizens. The third branch 
arose from a man with a taint of insanity who married a vagrant 
and degraded Italian woman. The son resulting from this union 
married a woman of a vagabond German family Markus, by 
whom he had seven children, each of whom formed the starting 
point of a line of degenerate progeny. For three generations the 
