Page 20 - The Black Range Naturalist Vol. 4, No. 3

Specimen sheet of Penstemon heterophyllus, collected by G. R. Vasey, in Marin County, California, during 1880. The specimen referred to on the specimen sheet of P. spinulosus shown on pages 15 and 17.
George R. Vasey Jr. was born in August 1853 and died in May 1921. He was also a plant collector.
Unfortunately, the collector cards on the specimen sheets do not distinguish between Sr. and Jr. Given, however, that G. R. Vasey Sr. was actively corresponding from Washington, D.C., during June of 1881, it is probably safe to conclude that the specimens collected in New Mexico were collected by G. R. Vasey Jr. Indeed, the Harvard University Herbaria cross references the plants collected in the Santa Magdalena Mountains of New Mexico during the summer of 1881 with G. R. Vasey Jr.
That said, it does not get us much closer to the question about the provenance of the plant specimen in question.
George R. Vasey Jr. was also collecting in other New Mexico locales during 1881, from Santa Fe County to the Organ Mountains (Harvard Collection linked to above). During that period he collected several type specimens. Later in the year he was collecting in Texas (El Paso), Arizona, and California (Riverside and San Bernardino Counties).
Several of the specimen sheets from the 1881 collection trip are “complex collection objects”, meaning that two items are presented on one specimen sheet. Some of the specimen sheets also have obvious geographical errors; several collected in Kingman, Arizona are listed as Kingman, New Mexico, for instance. (Note, however, that Kingman was part of
the New Mexico Territory until 1863, when Arizona was split from the New Mexico Territory.)
A Phlox specimen is listed as being collected in the Santa Magdalena Mountains of New Mexico during June 1882, Phlox nana. This, however, appears to be a database entry error. The date on the specimen sheet appears to be a scribbled “1881”, and Vasey is not known to have been in New Mexico during 1882. On a similar point, however, the Harvard collection includes a specimen of Ipomopsis longiflora (among others) with collection data indicating that it was collected in El Paso
There are several specimens sheets held at Yale University which identify the collector as George R. Vasey, from June 1881, collected in the Magdalena Mountains of New Mexico, including at least one (other) penstemon - Penstemon ambiguous.
At this point in my search I was wondering if these were cases of shared collector cards. I have come across several instances, from 1840 to about 1870, where the collector identification
cards placed at the bottom right of specimen sheets were shared, sometimes indiscriminately.
The other possibility I began to consider was that the son mentioned in George R. Vasey’s letter of July 28, 1881, the son who, in New Mexico, had collected some of the specimens being sent to Watson, was also named George R. Vasey.
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