Mary De la Beche Nicholl

Mary De la Beche "Minnie" Nicholl FES (née Dillwyn; 25 June 1839 - 30 October 1922) was a lepidopterist and mountaineer.[1]

Mary De la Beche Nicholl

Family

Nicholl was born in Swansea in 1839. She was the daughter of Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn and Elizabeth (née De la Beche). She had an older brother Henry (b. 1843) who became a barrister. and two younger sisters, Amy Dillwyn (b.1845) a novelist and industrialist, and Sarah, known as Essie (b. 1852) who became an actress after a divorce.[2]

Her uncle was John Dillwyn-Llewelyn of Penllergare who, along with his wife Emma Thomasina Talbot, his sister (Mary's aunt) Mary Dillwyn and his daughter (Mary's cousin) Theresa Story Maskelyne (née Dillwyn-Llewellyn) were pioneers of early photography. Her paternal grandfather was the naturalist Lewis Weston Dillwyn and her maternal grandfather was geologist Henry De La Beche. The Dillwyn family were originally Quakers and her great-grandfather was William Dillwyn, the anti-slavery campaigner from Pennsylvania, USA who returned to campaign in Britain.[2]

She married John Cole Nicholl on Swansea in 1860,[3] and had six children. She died in Bridgend, Wales, in 1922.[4][5]

Lepidoptery

Nicholl was best known for her work on butterflies. Nicholl published a number of papers on her research on butterflies between 1897 and 1904,[6] including "Bulgarian Butterflies" in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation (1899)[7][8] and "Butterflies of the Lebanon" was published in The Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London (1902).[9]

A book about the life of Mary De la Beche Nicholl was published in 1979 titled: Grandmother Extraordinary.[10]

References
  1. Gates, Barbara T. (1998). Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. University of Chicago Press. p. 167. ISBN 9780226284439.
  2. "DILLWYN, ELIZABETH AMY (1845 - 1935), novelist, industrialist and feminist campaigner | Dictionary of Welsh Biography". biography.wales. Retrieved 2020-08-15.
  3. General Registars Office register of marriages, 1911 census of England and Wales
  4. "Mary De La Beche Nicholl". Geni.
  5. "Mary De La Beche "Minnie" Dillwyn Nicholl..." Find a Grave.
  6. Creese, Mary R. S. (2000). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Scarecrow Press. p. 74. ISBN 9780585276847.
  7. Nicholl, Mary De la B. (1899). "Bulgarian Butterflies". The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation. 12 (2): 29 – via Google Books.
  8. Thomas, Hilary Margaret (1979). Grandmother Extraordinary: Mary De la Beche Nicholl, 1839-1922. S. Williams. p. 103. ISBN 978-0900807312.
  9. Nicholl, Mary De la Beche (1902). "Butterflies of the Lebanon". Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London: 75 – via Google Books.
  10. Thomas, Hilary Margaret (1979). Grandmother Extraordinary: Mary De la Beche Nicholl, 1839-1922. S. Williams. ISBN 978-0900807312.


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