Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924)

I have just posted a major new update to my Hall Families of New England Master file. I have continued to expand, refine, and source Hall DNA Family 020 – Halls of Yarmouth. This family is much larger and more complicated than I ever expected when I started working on it. I can see that I will be working on it for several more months.

I have made some progress, but no completion, to trying to link the Onondaga county, New York, Halls with this family. We have at least one proven by DNA to be part of Family 020.

While I was finalizing this update, my high school Williston Academy (now Williston-Northampton School, but us old alums have never accepted the name change…) sent out a fundraising email honoring G. Stanley Hall, Williston Seminary, Class of 1863.

I have included G(ranville) Stanley Hall in this latest update. (Click the link to see his genealogy) Not only does he descend from both John Hall of Yarmouth, the immigrant ancestor of this Hall family, but he is also a descendant of Thomas Howes, the immigrant ancestor of the Cape Cod Howes family. And since he is from the early Cape Cod families, he is also a direct descendant of the Mayflower’s John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, among a few other Mayflower passengers.

As seems so frequent in major figures, he had few children. He had a son and daughter. His daughter and his first wife were killed by gas asphyxiation in 1890. His son Dr. Robert Granville Hall became one of the early specialists in pediatrics and moved from Boston to Portland, Oregon. Dr. Robert G Hall has a living grandson and granddaughter.

Dr. G Stanley Hall was the first President of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His scholarship was been rewarded with a lengthy article on Wikipedia. That article exposes the only blemish on his illustrious career… But it is such a blemish that I wonder if Williston should have honored him:

“Hall was deeply wedded to the German concept of Volk, an anti-individualist and authoritarian romanticism in which the individual is dissolved into a transcendental collective. Hall believed that humans are by nature non-reasoning and instinct driven, requiring a charismatic leader to manipulate their herd instincts for the well-being of society. He predicted that the American emphasis on individual human right and dignity would lead to a fall that he analogized to the sinking of Atlantis.

…

“Hall had no sympathy for the poor, the sick, or those with developmental differences or disabilities. A firm believer in selective breeding and forced sterilization, he believed that any respect or charity toward those he viewed as physically, emotionally, or intellectually weak or “defective” simply interfered with the movement of natural selection toward the development of a super-race.”

Because you have something in common with G. Stanley Hall, Class of 1863— and that’s kind of awesome. G. Stanley had a storied academic career and after teaching at Williams, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins, he became the first president of Clark University in 1889. An early Ph.D. in psychology, Professor Hall was a pioneer in the psychology of adolescence. And he was the person who brought Sigmund Freud for his first and only visit to the United States. Who knew?

So… Please enjoy this update and share your comments on here or on Facebook