Astronomy from the Bottom Up: Edward Emerson Barnard

Edward Emerson Barnard was born on December 16, 1857, in Nashville, Tennessee, a city better known today for its music, not astronomy. His parents, Reuben and Elizabeth, had just moved to Nashville from Cincinnati, but Edward never met his father, who died 3 months before his birth. His mother, Elizabeth Jane née Heywood, already 42 years old, was originally from Kentucky. In contrast to patrician Percival Lowell, who could trace his ancestry on his maternal side back to the Norman conquest, Barnard was more like the charity boy Noah Claypole in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, who could trace his genealogy all the way back to his parents.