How would you feel if your spouse brought work along on your honeymoon? It might not have been Ruth M. Blackwelder's honeymoon, but in 1935 she married Richard E. Blackwelder and, in June, they were off to the West Indies for an extended time of scientific research. Richard collected 50,000 Coleoptera, or beetles, during that trip. Ruth and Richard worked together closely and co-authored several important works including the 4th supplement of "The Leng catalogue of Coleoptera of America, North of Mexico" and "The Directory of Zoological Taxonomists."
Join our digital volunteers in transcribing Ruth's diaries and get a glimpse of what this West Indies expedition experience was like from her point of view.
How would you feel if your spouse brought work along on your honeymoon? It might not have been Ruth M. Blackwelder's honeymoon, but in 1935 she married Richard E. Blackwelder and, in June, they were off to the West Indies for an extended time of scientific research. Richard collected 50,000 Coleoptera, or beetles, during that trip. Ruth and Richard worked together closely and co-authored several important works including the 4th supplement of "The Leng catalogue of Coleoptera of America, North of Mexico" and "The Directory of Zoological Taxonomists."
Join our digital volunteers in transcribing Ruth's diaries and get a glimpse of what this West Indies expedition experience was like from her point of view.
Ruth MacCoy and Richard Eliot Blackwelder were married in 1935. The pursuit of knowledge was an essential part of their relationship, reflecting in their joint authorship of scholarly material during their first years of marriage and again decades later. Their knack for organization and categorization did not wane as time passed. Richard Blackwelder received a Walter Rathbone Traveling Scholarship from the Smithsonian to pursue his research of beetles in the West Indies. Several of his field journals have already been transcribed by volunteers.
When Blackwelder returned to the United States, he took on curatorial responsibilities at the Smithsonian where he worked intil 1954. From there, Blackwelder went on to teach zoology at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York and later at Southern Illinois University until he retired in 1977. When Richard retired, he brought these skills to bear on writer J. R. R. Tolkien and his works. As Blackwelder gathered scholarly materials about the writer and his literature, the Blackwelder home became host to what some consider the preeminent collection of secondary sources about Tolkien now under the stewardship of Marquette University.
Ruth's diaries are part of the Richard E. Blackwelder Papers, 1926-1964 held by the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
