Harriette Merrifield Forbes

Harriette Merrifield Forbes was born as Hattie Merrifield on 22 October 1856 in Worcester, United States of America. She married William Trowbridge Forbes (1850-1931), who taught mathematics at Robert College in Constantinople, and moved to USA to study law.^[2] He later became a judge in Worcester in 1888.^[3]

Forbes is widely recognized as a pioneering scholar in the study New England gravestone art. She authored the first definitive work on the subject, Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them: 1653–1800, published in 1927.^[4] She photographed the early gravestones throughout central and eastern Massachusetts, even before the invention of the technically advanced “Brownie camera and flexible film”.^[5] Her work is considered "groundbreaking" since it became the basis for other research on this topic,^[6] most notably the work of Allan Ludwig.^[1]

Esther Forbes (1891-1967), author and antiquarian, was one of her daughters.^[7] Forbes “served as her daughter's most important researcher.” ^[8]

She died in 1951.

Forbes's works include.

• Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them (1927)
• The Hundredth Town: Glimpses of Life in Westborough 1717-1817
• New England Diaries, 1602-1800: A Descriptive Catalogue of Diaries, Orderly Books and Sea Journals