Lyman County, South Dakota  Genealogy

Julia Anna Gardner
Material compiled by Barney Considine, 2007
 

Julia Anna Gardner was my mother’s cousin.  Julia’s mother and my mother’s father were sister and brother.  The following biography of Julia was found during a search of the internet.

GARDNER, JULIA ANNA (1882-1960). Julia Anna Gardner, geologist, was born on January 26, 1882, in Chamberlain, South Dakota, the only child of Charles Henry and Julia (Brackett) Gardner. She spent most of her childhood in South Dakota but completed high school in North Adams, Massachusetts. In 1907 she obtained a master's degree at Bryn Mawr University, where she had taken undergraduate training. She earned her Ph.D. in paleontology at Johns Hopkins University in 1911. Until 1915 she worked as an assistant in paleontology at the university and as part-time geologist with the Maryland Geological Survey. She was then employed by the United States Geological Survey in Washington, D.C.

Although Gardner's initial research concerned the Upper Cretaceous in Maryland, she devoted most of her career to studying the Tertiary beds in the Coastal Plain, including areas from Maryland south into Mexico. She began working in Texas in the early 1920s, often in consultation with petroleum company geologists. In addition to shorter papers, she prepared The Midway Group of Texas, a bulletin on stratigraphy, comparing the Midway with rocks of similar age in the United States and abroad. In it she described some seventy new species of Texas fossils for the first time. Research on Gulf Coast fauna took Gardner into Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1945 the Geological Society of America published her findings under the title Mollusca of the Tertiary Formations of Northeastern Mexico.

Gardner served as president of the Paleontological Society in 1952. In 1953 she became the third woman to hold the vice presidency of the Geological Society of America. Upon retirement from the United States Geological Survey, she received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Department of the Interior's highest honor. She died on November 15, 1960, in Bethesda, Maryland.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nelson Sayre, "Memorial, Julia Ann Gardner," Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 45 (1961).

The following is from a piece that Winnie Considine wrote for a historical group in Murdo, South Dakota. 

The Dakota Bracketts date back to about 1890 when Charles Brackett and his family came to Chamberlain from Dixon, Illinois.  A sister of his, Julia Brackett Gardner, had moved there a short time earlier hoping to benefit Mr. Gardner’s health.  When Dr. Gardner died my Aunt Julia found herself in a difficult position so my father moved out to help her.

from unpublished draft material found in Winnie Considine’s papers

There are three references to Julia Anna Gardner in Winnie Considine’s diaries – obviously, Winnie knew Julia as Ann Gardner.

             November 24, 1960

I rec’d word Julia Ann Gardner died Nov. 15 in Washington, D.C.  She has always been a part of my life.

December 9, 1960

Death has come often.  My brother Charlie died Dec. 2, following an operation, at the age of 71 yrs.  Ann Gardner was 78 yrs. old, Bertha Swope not quite 77 yrs.

March 1, 1963

……something that came as a great surprise.  When I first learned my cousin Julia Ann Gardner had remembered me in her will I thot it would be a token.  Yesterday I received close to $20,000.00 in Blue Chip stocks, and $5000.00 in cash

December 7, 1970

I had them sell the Portfolio Ann Gardner left to me many years ago.

Charlie and Bertha were two of Winnie Considine’s siblings (Bertha was the oldest and died August 8, 1960).  When I sold the portfolio in 1970, I believe it was worth something over $30,000.  As I remember it, the bequeath to Winnie represented a third of Julia Gardner’s estate and she had instructed her executor how to invest in the stocks before they were sent to Winnie.  I am hazy on what happened to the other two-thirds of the estate but possibly a third went to Bryn Mawr University and a third to a charity.  Not mentioned in the diary is a print that I am certain Julia Gardner sent to my mother.  It now hangs in our house and is shown at right.  I haven’t been able to determine the artist or any other background concerning the painting.

Some other neat things showed up during the search of the internet.  For example:

Maryland's Official State Fossil Shell

As of October 1, 1994, the official fossil shell of Maryland is an extinct snail, or gastropod: Ecphora gardnerae gardnerae. Actually, this same fossil snail was first designated by the Maryland General Assembly in 1984, but there has been a name change. The legislature's action in 1994 was in response to a name change by the scientific community. The previous name was Ecphora quadricostata (Say). Changes in nomenclature are nothing new for Ecphora (or for most fossils, for that matter).

The shells of the various species and subspecies of the genus Ecphora constitute one of the most unusual and diagnostic types of fossil in the Miocene fauna of the mid-Atlantic region. Key characteristics that aid in identification by collectors are

3.      its moderately wide umbilicus, which is a hollow cone-shaped feature along the axis of coiling

The honor of naming a fossil falls to the paleontologist who first publishes the revised classification and nomenclature. In this case, that was Druid Wilson, who was working for the Smithsonian Institution at the time. In 1987, he proposed the name Ecphora gardnerae. Soon after that, two other paleontologists (Ward and Gilinski, 1988) further subdivided the genus Ecphora, and introduced several subspecies. Thus was born the name of Ecphora gardnerae gardnerae Wilson for the distinctive fossil shell. (Strictly speaking, from a taxonomy and nomenclature viewpoint, "Wilson" is part of the complete name and should not be in parentheses.) There are other species and subspecies of Ecphora in the Miocene strata of Southern Maryland, and they each have their own distinguishing characteristics.

The name of the genus often, but not always, is derived from a Latin or Greek word that is descriptive of some key characteristic of the organism. The second part of the name identifies the species and also derives from Latin or Greek. The species name may reflect some characteristic feature of the organism, or refer to the locality where it was first found, or may be a "latinized" word in honor of some noted paleontologist. For example, the Maryland fossil shell derives its genus name from the Greek ekphora, meaning "protruding." The species name, quadricostata, comes from the Latin for "four ribs" (quad = four; costa = rib)., in reference to the presence of four strongly developed protruding "ribs," or costae. (Note that the T-shape distinguishes this fossil from other related four-ribbed species of Ecphora.) The more recent species designation of gardnerae is in honor of U.S. Geological Survey paleontologist Julia Gardner (Wilson, 1987). In this case, the subspecies name is a repetition of the species name, and the name "Wilson" denotes the person who originated the species name.

A piece that I found even more interesting came from Oceanography Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2005 (http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/18_1.html).  In a piece titled “The U.S. Geological Survey:  Sea-Going Women” written by Dawn Lavoie and Deborah Hutchinson was the following:

One of the first women geologists hired by the USGS, Julia Gardner, earned her PhD in paleontology at Johns Hopkins University in 1911. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Military Geologic Unit of the USGS where she helped locate Japanese beaches from which incendiary bombs were being launched by identifying shell species in the sand ballast of the balloons.

Certainly, born in 1882, Julia Gardner was a pioneer.  As sort of a footnote to Julia’s story is the following about Julia’s teacher, Florence Bascom (1862-1945) at Bryn Mawr University.  Florence Bascom was the daughter of the president of University of Wisconsin and earned two degrees from Wisconsin University and she applied to study with George H. Williams, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University.

 ….the executive committee [of Johns Hopkins University] concluded that Bascom could attend without being officially enrolled as a student, and charged only for her laboratory fees. During classes, Bascom's seat was located in the corner of the classroom - and hidden behind a screen. Undaunted, Bascom applied formally to the doctoral program in 1892. She was accepted secretly. By intrepidly completing difficult and often solitary field work, Bascom produced a dissertation that a writer in American Mineralogist later described as "brilliant." For this, Bascom earned in 1893 the first Ph.D. in geology ever awarded to a woman by an American university.