George Veditz

George Veditz
Born	George William Veditz August 13, 1861 Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Died	March 12, 1937 Colorado, USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	teacher, former president of National Association of the Deaf, and one of the first American Sign Language filmmakers.

George William Veditz (August 13, 1861 – March 12, 1937) was a former president of National Association of the Deaf of the United States and was one of the first to film American Sign Language.

Veditz was born to two German immigrants and was enrolled in Zion School in Baltimore, a bilingual school at age five, becoming fluent in both German and English before losing his hearing at age 8 to scarlet fever. After initially being educated by a private instructor, he entered the Maryland School for the Deaf in 1875. Following his graduation, he attended Gallaudet College, where he studied to be a teacher. During Veditz's time as a student, the college was known as the "National Deaf-Mute College" at the Columbia Institution for the Deaf. In 1893, it was renamed Gallaudet College, then later became Gallaudet University.

Following his graduation from Gallaudet in 1884, Veditz began to work as a teacher at the Maryland School for the Deaf. The next year, in 1885, he accepted a new position at the Colorado School for the Deaf, where he worked as a teacher for another seventeen years. While in Colorado, he maintained his ties with his alma mater in Maryland, serving as a leader of its alumni association, and providing the foundation for what would become the Maryland Association of the Deaf.

In 1904, Veditz was elected president of the National Association of the Deaf of the United States (NAD) and was re-elected in 1907. Its greatest preoccupation was the preservation of sign language, which he saw as being threatened by the advancement of the oralist proposals in schools. During this time, cinema gained popularity, and Veditz dedicated the NAD to gather money to finance recordings of speeches in sign language.

The project, which began in 1910, aimed to film to masterful uses of sign language. One of the people recorded was the then-director of Gallaudet, Edward Miner Gallaudet. The shootings of the NAD were the first registry done of sign languages in the world, and are considered a valuable document of Deaf history. In the film, Veditz makes an enthusiastic defense of the right of the Deaf people to use sign language and talks of its beauty, as well as its value to humanity. The Library of Congress announced on December 28, 2011, that it had named the landmark 1913 film, The Preservation of the Sign Language, for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

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