His book claimed Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740,[2] had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients, and two cases of "feeble-mindedness".
[4] The term "Jukes" became, along with "Kallikaks" and "Nams" (other case studies of a similar nature), a cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the Southern and Northeastern United States.
[3] Legal historian Paul A. Lombardo states that very soon the Jukes family study was turned into a "genetic morality tale", which combined religious notions of the sins of the father and eugenic pseudoscience.
[1] A follow-up study was published by Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1916 as The Jukes in 1915.
[2] Strongly emphasizing heredity, Estabrook's conclusions reversed Dugdale's argument about the environment, proposing that such families be prevented from reproducing, since no amount of environmental changes could alter their genetic inheritance towards criminality.
In addition, the attempt to link a trait, such as poverty, to genetic makeup, ignoring environmental issues, has been "totally discredited", as noted by geneticist Andrés Ruiz Linares in a 2011 historical review.
Further information was found in the archives at the State University of New York at Albany and in records of a forgotten Ulster County poorhouse.
[2] However, "the mythology of so-called 'genetically problematic families' is still with us," said Paul A. Lombardo of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia.