Hansford: Mental Defectives in County Indiana 85 
Jesse, the third child of Robert and Addie McHaley, died 
at the age of 7 years. The 5 younger children died in infancy. 
There is to be found among the 39 descendants of Addie, the 
first child of Mahlon Johnson, no person who is or has been a 
self-supporting respectable citizen. 
Clara and Myrtle, the second and third children of Mahlon 
Johnson and his wife, Dessie Harris, are unknown. Nancy 
is supposed to be living somewhere in 0. County. 
Walter Johnson, fourth child of Mahlon and Dessie, is said 
by a physician of his town to have been feeble-minded, licen- 
tious, and alcoholic. He died after being crippled and par- 
alyzed for a number of years. He was syphilitic. He has 2 
married daughters, one of them being syphilitic. 
Otis Johnson, the fifth child of Mahlon and Dessie, mar- 
ried Catherine Henderson and moved to Stonetown from 
0. County. There they lived steeped in filth and poverty. 
He was alcoholic and lazy and she was filthy, lazy, feeble- 
minded, and tubercular. They reared 4 children: Hazel, 
Amanda, James, and Daniel. Lizzie, a daughter, died while a 
young girl. Otis was probably feeble-minded. A physician 
who knew him says that he was shiftless, alcoholic, and was 
not ''quite right in his head”. 
Mrs. Hazel Johnson Gardner, the first child of Otis John- 
son, is a low-grade moron. ( She is also alcoholic, syphilitic, 
and licentious. In appearance she is a dirty, repulsive woman 
with a light growth of beard on her face. She chews tobacco, 
swears, drinks, and does not look as if she had washed for 
years. She is very licentious and lives with men other than 
her husband most of the time. When visited by the field 
worker, she was living in a board cabin on an alley which 
runs thru the slums of Stonetown. She was not with her 
husband but living with Pat Dunigan helping him to distrib- 
ute some bad whiskey. Her husband, who was keeping house 
on another street for his 4 children, bought his whiskey of 
them, often staying in Pat's establishment several days at a 
time when the liquor was plentiful. When business was bad. 
Hazel usually helped out with a few washings. At the present 
• time she is living in a nearby county seat with her sons and 
a sister, having left John altogether. 
The first child of Hazel and John Gardner died in infancy. 
Alice, the second child of Hazel, was born June 1, 1900, 
