Trait Files documents

23 pedigree 06 2 thumb
04 individual analysis card 4 1 thumb
11 s family history 6 thumb
02 immigration and insanity 4 thumb
03 family tree folder 03 1 thumb
03 bertha family study thumb
09 m.k 5 thumb
00 harvard college physical records thumb
04 suy family 4 thumb
05 family history of pb kings park 2 thumb
11 german family history 15 thumb
03 jamaica male measurements 03 1 thumb
02 measurements correspondence 1 thumb
02 congressional record negro racial question 2 thumb
03 j.m 3 thumb
06 family tree folder 2 thumb
01 oberlin data series 6 thumb
00 one egg twins psychoses thumb
08 percentage of foreign born maps 10 thumb
09 pure or mixed 5.9 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.