Hello, this is a guest post by Jessica- I will share what it’s like to grow up in a family with the majority being Deaf. We often get people asking us many questions about our extraordinary family because it is not common to find a family where deafness spans more than two generations.

First, I will eat the humble pie and share this fact: an island off the coast of Massachusetts, called Martha’s Vineyard is a truly extraordinary place in the world – by the 19th century, almost 1 in every 155 people were DEAF!!! The entire island was bilingual with English and Sign Language being the languages that everyone use, whether they were deaf or not. How amazing is that? It’s almost like “Deaf Utopia” where communication or career barriers did not even exist.

(you can check out the online source http://catalog.chilmarklibrary.org/pdf/ for more amazing information on this history…