In this family consanguineous marriages have been very frequent, perhaps partly because the Jukes came to be looked upon as pariahs and could not associate on equal terms with other members of the community. These marriages seem to have been fully as productive as the average of the family, and the offspring of as high a grade of intelligence. However, some individual cases are worthy of special mention as illustrative of intensification of hereditary tendencies.
(1) An illegitimate son of Ada Juke married a daughter of Bell Juke. He was a laborer, honest and industrious. She was reputable and healthy, and her father had a good reputation, but her mother had given birth to four illegitimate children before marriage, three of whom were mulattoes. Thus in this marriage of first cousins, three out of the four parents were of a low moral grade. As a result of this marriage three sons and three daughters were born. Two sons were licentious, intemperate and dishonest, two daughters were prostitutes, and the third became such after her husband was sent to prison. Only one son turned out fairly well. This son married a second cousin, a granddaughter of Delia Juke, and four out of his seven children were above the average of the family. His two elder brothers, however, married prostitutes, and became ancestors of criminals, prostitutes and syphilitics.[54]
(2) A legitimate son of Ada Juke, whose father was a thief and a pauper, married a daughter of Clara Juke, whose antecedents were fairly good. The husband had contracted syphilis before marriage and entail it upon every one of his eight children. Five daughters became prostitutes and one was idiotic. The only daughter who bore a good reputation married a grandson of both Clara and Bell Juke. This was a remarkable case of selection. Both husband and wife were grandchildren of Clara, and so first cousins, and both were the offspring of first cousins, all within the Juke blood. But, on the other hand, both were the descendants of Clara, the best of the Juke sisters, and both were the best of the progeny of their respective parents. The only serious taint was the secondary syphilis which the wife had inherited from her father. Six children were born, two males and four females. The eldest son was at 31 "laborer, industrious, temperate;" the eldest daughter "good repute, temperate, read and write;" second daughter, "harlot;" third daughter "good repute, temperate;" and the two youngest are given simply as "unmarried." This family seems to have had as high an average mentally and morally as any family in the whole tribe, only one in six being distinctly immoral. In the next generation, the eldest son had two children, the eldest daughter four, and the third daughter, who married a first cousin, had one child. It would be of great interest to know more of this last marriage, the third generation of consanguinity in marriage, and the fourth first-cousin marriage in three generations, but at the time the book was written the parties were still in their early twenties.[55]