The ancestor with whom the investigation begins was born some time between 1720 and 1740.  In the report the original is called “Max.”  He has been described as a “hunter and fisher,” “a hard drinker,” “not fond of work,” fairly intelligent and leaving no record of crime.  He probably left behind a large family, some of whom were legitimate and some illegitimate.  The family came from a barren, rocky, lake region in New York and several generations grew up in the vicinity.  The only industry was rough work like quarrying stone, logging and the like.  Later a manufacturing plant was located in the region.  The Jukes early got a bad name in the small community.  Even when they wanted to find employment it was hard to get a job.  They were socially ostracized and individually boycotted.  The region was poor, and for the most part the family grew up in poverty.  Often several members of a family lived in one room and slept on the floor indiscriminately, regardless of sex.  For several generations few of them wandered far from the ancestral home.  The locality was one that naturally came to be the resort of the poor and the outcast; these are always driven to the cheapest and most barren land.  Whether the community was related by blood or not, the residents would almost inevitably be of the same class.  Rich people cluster closely together for association and fellowship.  The poor and wretched do the same.  Common observation in city and country shows that this is inevitable.  It comes from deeper and more fundamental laws than human statutes.  It is born of the gregarious instinct and fostered and developed by economic law.

In the main, lax habits grow from surroundings and association.  The tendency of all human beings is to revert to the primal.  It is only association that keeps the individual units up to the tension that civilization expects and demands.  Every community shows many examples of this inevitable tendency.  Nature is constant; civilization spasmodic.  Especially with sex relations, conditions are the chief factor.  Nature knows little or nothing of the regulations fixed by society and custom.  Poverty and wretchedness reach outward through a community and by association between the old and the young pass down the generations.  Nothing but a complete change of environment can counteract the inevitable tendency.  When social classes arise and the cleavage is clear and established, no great effort is made by the superior members to aid the inferior.  In fact they are almost invariably left to themselves.  Poverty and wretchedness are not transmitted in the blood, but in the environment.

It is not many years since physicians and communities believed that tuberculosis was inherited.  In all communities there were instances of this dread disease spreading out through families and down the generations.  It required the sacrifice of many lives and the careful investigation of scientists to discover that tuberculosis was the result of germs, generally accompanied by an impoverished system.  These germs were transferred by close association and lack of sanitary conditions.  It is as easy to transmit shiftlessness, idleness and lax habits as disease.