There were two identical thick books on the shelf titled The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton, published in 1907.
One was obviously quite old, with loose pages in a lightweight cardboard slipcase. The other had been rebound in the thick sturdy library binding. I chose that one, as I didn’t want to do any damage to the fragile one.
While my husband was researching grants in the New York State Library, I had wandered over to the Genealogy section to see if I could find anything on my father’s family from upstate New York. There was nothing — not one thing. So I had turned to my mother’s paternal side, which I knew had been well researched and written about.
I sat down and opened the book to the section of the genealogy of Samuel Gorton’s descendants — tucked in the binding was a newspaper clipping with a photo of an elderly, bald, bearded, doleful-looking man, and an exhausted-looking brown-haired middle aged woman, each holding a baby. I glanced at it. Something made me take a closer look. I couldn’t believe my eyes! There was my mother and her twin brother, mother and father. Someone had added it when the book was rebound.
I had seen several photos of the twins and their parents, but I’d never seen this one. Had I chosen the other book, I never would have discovered it.
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There were two stories as far as I could tell from reading the papers of that time.
First, a love story. An 80-year-old doctor, author, and “pioneer Brooklyn homeopath,” married his 40-year-old amanuensis, his literary secretary who helped him write his books. This was the story I’d heard from my mother.
Second, a science experiment to verify the doctor’s theories of eugenics. Dr. Gorton was a founding member of the American Eugenics Society. As a eugenist, he was intrigued to create a human being with good traits, genes, “well born”. His literary secretary “fully shared his interest in eugenics and they decided to marry.” This is the story I found in the newspapers from 1912, now online.
Shortly after his first wife died, the 80-year-old doctor carefully researched his 40-year-old amanuensis’ family and verified that she came from “good stock”.
She passed the test, and they married in 1911. They went on a cruise for their honeymoon, and, even having broken his toe on a rocking chair in their cabin, nine months later, they were the proud (and notorious) parents of the “eugenic twins”, Leonora, my mother, and her brother, David Allyn Gorton II. Believing that it was possible to predetermine the sex of a child, Dr. Gorton had predicted that he’d have a boy (my mother evidently was a surprise), who would be named after him.
It was a sensation. There were newspaper articles about the “eugenic twins” all over Brooklyn and New York in 1912, and other parts of the country. It’s still possible to find some online about Dr. Gorton, the 80-year-old doctor, well-known eugenist, and his “well-born twins”.
