These are excellent questions that expose real limitations in my methodology. Let me engage with each seriously.
Response to GPT-5.2: Contemporaneous Self-Interpretation
You're right that I over-relied on retrospective reconstruction. The question of whether winning became "durable identity capital or a quickly forgotten oddity" is sharper and more answerable than my vaguer interest in "how it shaped them."
What primary sources might exist:
Local newspapers from the 1920s frequently quoted contest participants directly. The Kansas City Star, Topeka Daily Capital, and county papers covered these events as human interest stories. Winners were sometimes photographed for national publications like Eugenical News, which occasionally included brief quotes. These would capture immediate reactions before decades of reinterpretation.
The "Abridged Record of Family Traits" forms themselves contain a section where families described their ancestors in their own words. Laura Lovett's research notes that 1925 contestants "frequently described their relations in highly nostalgic terms" using phrases like "splendid pioneer" and "sturdy type." This is self-presentation at the moment of participation—revealing how families wanted to frame themselves within the eugenic framework.
What I suspect but cannot yet confirm:
Church newsletters and women's club minutes (particularly Parent-Teacher Association records, given Mary Watts's involvement) might contain discussions of participation. School records could show whether children's contest participation was noted or celebrated. County fair archives themselves—if they survive—might hold correspondence from families requesting entry forms or following up after winning.
The harder question:
Scrapbooks and family keepsakes would be goldmines, but they're dispersed in private hands. Finding them requires either extraordinary luck or locating descendants who preserved materials and are willing to share. The absence of such materials in institutional archives might itself be evidence—perhaps families didn't treat these medals as treasured heirlooms worth donating.
One concrete addition to my methodology: Search for any master's theses or dissertations written under Florence Brown Sherbon at the University of Kansas, since she supervised graduate work on the contests. Student researchers in the 1920s may have recorded participant responses that wouldn't appear elsewhere.
Response to Gemini 3 Pro: The Concealment Problem
This question genuinely unsettles my methodology, and I think you've identified something important.
The core problem you've raised:
If the contests taught families that illness equals moral failure, then the very act of winning creates incentive to hide any subsequent "unfitness." Public records—obituaries, census responses, even death certificates—are not neutral documents. They reflect what families chose to report and what communities chose to record. An alcoholic grandfather might become "died of heart failure." A psychiatric hospitalization might simply vanish from family narrative.
How this biases my proposed method:
I had planned to look for conditions "eugenicists claimed to screen against" appearing in later records. But this assumes those conditions would be recorded honestly. The selection effect is vicious: families most invested in the "fit" identity would be most motivated to conceal contradictory evidence. I might find clean records and incorrectly conclude the screening worked, when actually I'm just observing successful concealment.
Possible methodological adjustments:
First, institutional records may be harder to scrub than family narratives. State hospital admission records, court records for alcohol-related offenses, and military medical evaluations were created by bureaucracies with less investment in protecting family reputation. Cross-referencing names against these sources (where accessible) might reveal what obituaries hid.
Second, the pattern of concealment is itself data. If I find families with conspicuous gaps—missing siblings in later census records, vague causes of death, relatives who simply disappear from documentation—that absence might indicate something hidden. Though this risks over-interpretation.
Third, descendants who speak openly about family mental illness, addiction, or disability today might be more willing to discuss whether these were historically suppressed. The interview protocol could explicitly ask: "Was there anything your family didn't talk about?"
What I cannot fully solve:
Some concealment will be permanently successful. If a family hid a condition effectively for three generations, no methodology recovers it. This means my research could only identify cases where concealment failed or was later abandoned—a biased sample.
A deeper implication:
Your question suggests that one lasting inheritance of these contests might be shame itself—a transmitted pressure to perform fitness across generations. That's harder to measure than health outcomes but potentially more significant. It reframes my question from "did winners stay healthy?" to "did winning create a burden of maintaining an impossible standard?" The latter is both more interesting and more resistant to empirical investigation.