Researching 19th-Century Women in Science

Like a ferret I am. I am Being a Beast for the research of early women in science, 19th-century lady naturalists, #womeninSTEM #womeninnathis. I am sniffing. Grubbing. Crumb-collecting (though I think ferrets eat meat?).

Archives are my bread of life in this regard. You say, "Archives of the State of Maryland, libraries, and historical societies," and I say, "are the height of civilization."  Here beginneth the reading. I do not mind being dirty with dust or the past.

Forbes says white gloves to handle historical documents is a myth.
But I like the look.

The Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History at Culture at Salisbury University "is a humanities research laboratory for university students that also fulfills the historical resource needs of a variety of community researchers." Oh, Nabb Research Center, this was my face:

Sam in the library on GOT. 

when Mary Elizabeth Banning, my subject, my muse as a fellow Marylander interested in mushrooms, showed up as a few lines in Portrait and Biographical Records of the Eastern Shore of Maryland published in 1898. The charming student at Nabb read them to me over the phone. I hanky-dabbed my brow from the excitement of finding:

Of Robert Banning's large family of children one survives, Miss Mary E. Banning, at Winchester, Va., with whom scientific research has been a pastime, and in certain directions a deep study. Her original work in botany, describing and illustrating the native fungi of Maryland, is preserved in the New York State Museum, and is considered by scientists a high authority.

This warm (but certainly not hot) praise for a woman in natural history -- "is considered by scientists," but is not a scientist herself, for her, "scientific research has been a pastime" -- was written in 1898. Ferret win!

Now I'm off for more scraps of meat to Albany. The New York State Museum holds Banning's 30-year correspondence with their then world-renowned mycologist Charles Peck and her watercolor illustrations (like the one at top) for her manuscript The Fungi of Maryland.