In 2012, when Elsie and I were undergraduate TAs of ornithology, Elsie happened upon this specimen of a Chuck-will's-widow (Antrostomus carolinensis) which our Gram (Majorie Crimmings McBride) had skinned 61 years before. I appreciate, even more keenly today, how special it is that her granddaughter Elsie, 61 years later, opened the drawer and picked that specimen--just by chance. And further-- that not one, not two, but three of her granddaughters were there that morning for a lab on Caprimulgiformes.
It is not only serendipity, though. In fact, I had announced (or prophesied) at age 12 that Elsie, Alice and I would go to Cornell and follow in Gram's footsteps. We three cousins were christened "Cerberus" (the three-headed dog in Hades' underworld) by Gram when we were 8 years old, because we were inseparable.
Gram, by example, helped instill in us a love of the natural world. Many of her avian and mammalian specimens in the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates came from a 15,000 mile road-trip WEST in 1950, when she was twenty years old and a junior at Cornell. She drove about the country for three months with her dear friend, Frances L. Burnett, who was a graduate student in ornithology. They collected salvage specimens and trapped for small mammals to add to the CUMV collections. I have been on several expeditions in Borneo, also collecting avian specimens for CUMV. Perhaps someday my own granddaughter, or one of Elsie or Alice's granddaughters will find one of the fluid specimens or spread wings I prepared, and continue the intermingling of natural history with the histories of those who have built these rich repositories of the natural world.
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