On Saturday, August 30, two scientists with deep connections to the Marine Biological Laboratory will be buried in Woods Hole. That, in itself, is not all that unusual. But who these scientists were, what they accomplished, and how they got here are all nothing short of remarkable.
Thomas Hunt Morgan is best known for winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking work in the emerging field of genetics. That was back in 1933. Morgan’s family later donated his Nobel medal and diploma to the MBL, where it remains on display in the library.
But Morgan’s remains, and those of his wife Lilian, turned out to be much harder to find.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up to the turn of the 20th century.
T.H. and Lilian Morgan both conducted research at MBL, beginning in 1891. In 1904 they married and T.H. became a professor at Columbia University.
Jane Maienchein is a History of Science Professor at Arizona State University. She said the Morgans continued to travel to Woods Hole to work at the MBL every summer.
“It was a place that Morgan and his wife, Lilian, could both do research in the lab,” she said. “At Columbia, she was kind of the spouse who was tolerated but not really welcome.”
The Morgans traveled up from New York City by train each summer, eventually with four children and jars of fruit flies in tow. To be clear, their work in the lab involved studying fruit flies. Starting in 1928, when T.H. Morgan went to work for the California Institute of Technology, the family would travel to Woods Hole from clear across the country.
Beth Trencheny, the Morgan’s great-granddaughter, said Lilian was a groundbreaking scientist in her own right, as well as a co-founder of the Children’s School of Science in Woods Hole.
“It’s such a tremendous legacy to be a part of,” she said. “They built something that is just amazing. Especially Lilian’s contributions to science, as a woman in science then – when we did not have a lot of women in science.”
In honor of that family legacy, last fall Beth’s husband Bob Trencheny planned a surprise for his wife and kids. The family was in Southern California for Thanksgiving. He had done a little online sleuthing about his wife’s famous ancestors. He found a Wikipedia article that gave a precise location for the Morgans’ final resting place at a cemetery in Altadena. But when they arrived at the mausoleum, the Morgans were nowhere to be found.
With the help of cemetery personnel, Beth Trencheny eventually learned that her great-great-grandparents’ cremains were in Altadena, but essentially in storage, with no public marker, and classified as abandoned.
“Originally there was a funeral home that handled the cremains or the service,” Beth said. “That funeral home went out of business after a couple years. And so they transferred the cremains to this Altadena cemetery. So there was a lot of chaos around the cremains.”
Thus started a months-long battle of legal red tape for the Trenchenys to get custody of the cremains. But Beth’s first challenge was explaining all this to her cousins.
“Because the family lore is that they’re buried in a beautiful grave outside of Pasadena,” Beth explained.
But the Morgans’ cremains never were buried. And Beth said it’s time to bring them back to Woods Hole.
“This is home and this is where all the Morgan family are,” she said. “This is where we’ve been told that they were the happiest. So immediately when we found out that this is an opportunity, we were so grateful.”
This weekend there will be a Morgan family reunion, including a graveside ceremony Saturday morning, next to the Church of the Messiah. To Beth, it feels like it was meant to be.
“Well we just feel so lucky,” she said. “We feel like they were waiting for us for 70, 80 years.”
If you’d like to pay respects to this pioneering pair of scientists, their new gravestone is just outside the MBL section of the Wood Hole Village Cemetery. It’s the one with engravings of a Nobel medal and a fly.
