Trait Files documents

02 k history 3 thumb
03 sun family 2 thumb
04 suy family 5 thumb
26 walker to davenport 5 thumb
01 disease inheritance from slavery 8 thumb
03 intellectual status 2 thumb
02 measurements correspondence 1 thumb
04 the papaun race 1 thumb
04 italian workers measurements 9 thumb
03 family history of ee kings park 3 thumb
01 ap clinical history 4 thumb
09 c family 1 thumb
04 responses 1 2 thumb
09 lyneham thumb
07 ringling circus giant 1921 thumb
07 case of fb kings park 1 thumb
05 case of m.l 17 thumb
06 s history 1 thumb
05 family history of pb kings park 11 thumb
11 buster child criminal photoset 6 thumb

The Eugenics Record Office was first and foremost a “repository and clearing house” for eugenics data. Through the “systematic” study of human heredity, the Office amassed an incredible quantity of files, forms, and assorted clipping related to a wide range of human traits. The bulk of this material comprised the “Trait Files,” a massive and rigidly organized index of human traits that sought to sort and rank human beings according to thousands of different attributes, from profession (“Teachers,” “Missionaries”) to mental ability (“Idiocy,” “Feeblemindedness”) to race (“Negro-Chinaman,” “Mulattoes”) and personality (“Sense of Humor, “Leadership”). But this data didn’t just sit around in the ERO’s archives. It was actively used to provide “scientific” justifications for a wide range of policies, from immigration restriction to sterilization and anti-miscegenation, that were shaped by leaders of the Eugenics Record Office.