Who Was Ruth MacCoy Blackwelder?

Ruth MacCoy Blackwelder is a woman who, even after extensive research, is still very much cloaked in mystery for me. Currently, the only online records of her existence lie in a line or two in various biographies about her husband, Richard, the byline of a book she co-wrote with him, and a newspaper article with details about her estate after her death in 1989. Thanks to the Smithsonian Transcription Center, that is about to change.

Ruth Blackwelder was born in El Oro, Mexico on September 9, 1910 to American parents Frederick and Ella MacCoy. On January 3, 1935, she married Richard Eliot Blackwelder, an entomologist who had just graduated from Stanford with his PhD. Shortly after their wedding, Richard received the Walter Rathbone Bacon Travelling Scholarship from the Smithsonian Institution to conduct research in the West Indies. On June 22, 1935, the pair set sail from New York, and arrived in Kingston, Jamaica five days later.

During their trip to the West Indies, Richard and Ruth Blackwelder kept separate journals of their activities. The majority of Richard's entries relate to his collecting work in the field, whereas Ruth's entries detail the life and experiences of an American woman in a foreign country. Her journals not only provide insight into her daily activities, but they also provide information about current events and  shed light on the interests and hobbies of this otherwise unknown woman.

One of the things that Ruth's journals make obvious pretty quickly is her love of stamp collecting. She often talks of the joy of receiving boxes of stamps for gifts, and the many nights she and Richard spent sorting and cleaning them. It seemed that her primary interest was in American and Caribbean stamps, and she often located collectors on the various islands they visited with whom she could trade or purchase additional stamps for her catalogue. After the couple returned to the United States, Ruth Blackwelder enlisted the help of J. F. Gates Clarke, curator in the Division of Insects at the Smithsonian Institution, to secure first run editions of stamps that she could not obtain locally. It is unclear what became of her seemingly large collection of stamps, but it is clear that the collection was something that she was proud of.

The last document we have from Ruth Blackwelder is a letter from July 1940. After that, her name doesn't surface again until she is listed as a co-author on Directory of Zoological Taxonomists of the World in 1961. She passed away on November 27, 1989 in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, where she and Richard moved after his retirement. Now that Ruth Blackwelder's journals from her trip to the West Indies are in the Smithsonian Transcription Center, what else can you uncover about the life of this mystery woman?

Related Collections

• Record Unit 140: United States National Museum Division of Insects, Correspondence, 1909-1963, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Accession 96-099: Richard E. Blackwelder Papers, 1926-1964, Smithsonian Institution Archives