“In 1874, Richard Dugdale... documented the lineages of no fewer than forty-two families heavily comprised of criminals, beggars, vagrants and paupers. He claimed that one group of 709 individuals were all descendents of a single pauper woman, known as Margaret and crowned 'mother of criminals.' Dugdale collectively dubbed these forty-two troubled families 'the Jukes.' ...[H]is 1877 book, The Jukes: a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, calculated the escalating annual cost to society for welfare, imprisonment, and other social services for each family...” (Black, 24).​​​​​​​

"McCulloch’s nationally renowned 1888 'Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation' concluded that heredity and environment were responsible for social dependence" (Poletika).​​​​​​​

The study laid the foundation for Indiana’s own forced sterilization law, despite the fact McCulloch renounced the claims made in the study before his death.

Goddard discovered a stock of paupers and ne’er-do-wells in the pine barrens of New Jersey and traced their ancestry back to the illicit union of an upstanding man with a supposedly feeble-minded tavern wench. The same man later married a worthy Quakeress and started another line composed wholly of upstanding citizens. Since the progenitor had fathered both a good and a bad line, Goddard combined the Greek words for beauty (kallos) and bad (kakos), and awarded him the pseudonym Martin Kallikak. Goddard’s Kallikak family functioned as a primal myth of the eugenics movement for several decades..." (Gould, 198).​​​​​​​