‹ The Hall of RecordsEntered into the record July 28, 2026
HISTORICAL RECORD · A DEMONSTRATIONAstronomy1857 to 1911

Filed under

Housemaid in the observatory director's household, then a copyist at duties "of the simplest character." [A3]Williamina Paton Fleming (biography), by J J O'Connor and E F RobertsonMacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrewsclass A · read 2026-07-28

Lifted off the plate

Page 27 of the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, 1890, listing catalogue entries 1901 to 2000 with the spectrum class recorded for each star.

[A7]Internet Archive, digitized from the copy held by the University of California Libraries1890NOT_IN_COPYRIGHTread 2026-07-29Scaled to 2200 px on the long edge and re-encoded as WebP. No crop, no tonal change.

The record

The observatory's own 1890 publication named her for the find; five years later, the catalogue that absorbed it named only the director. [A6]The First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonianclass A · read 2026-07-28

Williamina Fleming

This record holds the Harvard College Observatory's own account of Williamina Fleming, who entered its staff in 1881 as "a copyist and computer" and was credited, by the time of her death in 1911, with the discovery of ten novae, fifty nine gaseous nebulae, and more than three hundred variable stars. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28

Measured

What the record counts

10,351 stars
Classified for the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, published 1890 as Volumes XXVI and XXVII of the Harvard Annals, "with measures of their photographic light." [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28
222 variable stars
Given measured position and light magnitude sequences in her "Photographic Study of Variable Stars," Volume XLVII of the Harvard Annals. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28
59 gaseous nebulae
Found by the presence of bright lines in their photographic spectra, per the Astrophysical Journal's 1911 record of her work. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28
10 novae
Discovered by the same method, per the same institutional record. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28
11 subclasses
The number of subclasses into which she divided the spectral combination she used to flag candidate variable stars. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28

Record boundary

What the sources establish

Sources read
8
Primary or institutional
8
Distinct sources cited on this page
4
Works of record
4

Where the sources do not settle a question, this record does not answer it. Nothing above is inferred from anything else on the page.

What the record declines

A widely shared photograph of plate b02312 shows a red circle in ink, taken as a period mark of the discovery.

The record declines this. No mark of that kind exists on the plate. [A2]Plate b02312 metadata recordDASCH / StarGlass, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Harvard Plate Stacks)class A · read 2026-07-28

Checked: The DASCH plate metadata for b02312 was queried directly on 2026-07-28 and reports has_markings: false; the plate carries only its catalogue number, in dark ink, at the edge. The red circle seen in circulating images is a modern annotation added by a later publisher of the scan, not a period mark.

The Horsehead Nebula was "discovered by Pickering."

The record declines this framing. The observation on the plate is Fleming's; the credit line that survives into the standard catalogue is a later editorial choice, not a record of who found it. [A6]The First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonianclass A · read 2026-07-28

Checked: The Wolbach Library's published account of the publication history was checked: the 1890 Annals volume that first announced the finding credited Fleming by name; Dreyer's 1895 Index Catalogue of Nebulae, entry No. 434, folded it in under "Pickering" alone.

The 1895 catalogue entry names "W. H. Pickering," the director's brother, rather than the director himself.

The record declines to supply an initial that is not there. [A6]The First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonianclass A · read 2026-07-28

Checked: The credit line as recorded by the Wolbach Library reads "Pickering" with no first name or initial attached; the observatory's director at the time, whose 1890 Annals volume the entry draws from, was Edward C. Pickering.

Williamina Fleming, the Harvard astronomer, is the same person as Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered penicillin.

The record declines the conflation. They share only a surname. [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28

Checked: Williamina Fleming died in Boston on May 21, 1911, of pneumonia, per the Astrophysical Journal's obituary of that year; the bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, unrelated, died in 1955, a date this record does not otherwise reference.

The record

Williamina Fleming has a source page.

The same renderer a customer's published page mounts, drawing the same facts this room holds the sources for. Everything below is its apparatus.

View the record →sourceofyou.com/williamina-fleming
One record, two views

The apparatus

What stands behind the record: the works and who holds them, the claims this record refuses, every source read and when, and the gate stack this figure passed before a page was compiled.

Works

Works of record

Each work is listed with the institution that holds it and the rights statement that institution publishes, quoted as written.

1890

The Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28

Published as Volumes XXVI and XXVII of the Harvard Annals; "gives the spectra of 10,351 stars, with measures of their photographic light," the classification work assigned to Fleming.

Held by
American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data System
Rights, as published
© American Astronomical Society. Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

1907

A Photographic Study of Variable Stars [A1]Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data Systemclass A · read 2026-07-28

Volume XLVII of the Harvard Annals; gives measured positions and light magnitude sequences for 222 of the variable stars she discovered.

Held by
American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data System
Rights, as published
© American Astronomical Society. Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

1888

Harvard College Observatory photographic glass plate b02312 [A2]Plate b02312 metadata recordDASCH / StarGlass, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Harvard Plate Stacks)class A · read 2026-07-28

The plate on which she recorded the object later named the Horsehead Nebula; the DASCH digitization reports no markings on the plate beyond its catalogue number.

Held by
DASCH / StarGlass, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Harvard Plate Stacks)
Rights, as published
No separate rights statement is published at this API endpoint; public domain reproduction of the underlying plate follows the Harvard Library policy recorded in this record's sources (see A5).

1895

Index Catalogue of Nebulae Found in the Years 1888 to 1894 [A6]The First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonianclass A · read 2026-07-28

J. L. E. Dreyer's addition to Herschel's General Catalogue; the entry folding in the 1890 finding credits the nebula to "Pickering" alone, with no first initial.

Held by
Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Rights, as published
The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited (CC BY 4.0).
Sources

Sources

Class A is primary or institutional archival material. Class B is scholarly secondary work, cited with edition and page, and used only where class A could not be reached. Every source below was read at the URL given, on the date given.

  1. [A1]Class A

    Williamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317

    American Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data System

    https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1911ApJ....34..314C&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdfread 2026-07-28

    © American Astronomical Society. Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

  2. [A2]Class A

    Plate b02312 metadata record

    DASCH / StarGlass, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Harvard Plate Stacks)

    https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates?ids=b2312read 2026-07-28

    No separate rights statement is published at this API endpoint; public domain reproduction of the underlying plate follows the Harvard Library policy recorded in this record's sources (see A5).

  3. [A3]Class A

    Williamina Paton Fleming (biography), by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

    MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews

    https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fleming/read 2026-07-28

    Except where otherwise noted, the text of MacTutor by JOC/EFR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  4. [A4]Class A

    Williamina Paton Fleming, Royal Astronomical Society obituary (Monthly Notices, 1912)

    MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews (reproducing the Royal Astronomical Society's obituary)

    https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Obituaries/Fleming_RAS/read 2026-07-28

    Except where otherwise noted, the text of MacTutor by JOC/EFR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  5. [A5]Class A

    Policy on Access to Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain

    Harvard Library

    https://library.harvard.edu/about/policies/policy-access-digital-reproductions-works-public-domainread 2026-07-28

    Harvard Library asserts no copyright over digital reproductions of works in its collections which are in the public domain, where those digital reproductions are made openly available on Harvard Library websites; Harvard Library does not charge for permission to use those reproductions and requests appropriate citation to the source of reproductions.

  6. [A6]Class A

    The First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)

    Wolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    https://zenodo.org/records/8336178read 2026-07-28

    The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited (CC BY 4.0).

  7. [A7]Class A

    The Draper catalogue of stellar spectra photograhed with the 8-inch Bache telescope as a part of the Henry Draper memorial (Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, Vol. XXVII), printed page 27

    Internet Archive, digitized from the copy held by the University of California Libraries

    https://archive.org/details/drapercatalogueo00harvrichread 2026-07-29

    Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT. Copyright region: US. Copyright evidence: Evidence reported by ian white for item drapercatalogueo00harvrich on March 13, 2007: no visible notice of copyright; stated date is 1890.

  8. [A8]Class A

    W. P. Fleming, "A Field for Woman's Work in Astronomy", Astronomy and Astro-Physics, Volume 12, Number 8, October 1893, pages 683 to 689, bylined on the page "MRS. M. FLEMING.", footnoted "Read at the Congress of Astronomy and Astro-Physics, Chicago, August, 1893" and signed at the end "HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY, Cambridge, Mass., August 4, 1893". Pages 684 and 688 were read at the full size page images.

    Internet Archive, from its own microfilm digitization of the journal (collection sim_microfilm). The scan is NOT served by a named holding library, and that is recorded here rather than smoothed over: it is the weakest provenance in this bibliography, and it is used for one thing only, the wording of a paper she signed.

    https://archive.org/details/sim_astronomy-and-astro-physics_1893-10_12_8read 2026-07-29

    The item publishes no rights, licence, usage or copyright status field at all: the metadata fields are absent, and the details page carries no rights line. That absence is recorded here as exactly that. The paper was published in the United States in 1893 and is out of copyright by date. The NASA Astrophysics Data System holds no scan of this article (its PDF service returned an access denial on 2026-07-29), and the Harvard served Annals volume 47 carries no text layer, so neither could be used.

Clearance

How this record was cleared

Every record in the Hall passes the same gate stack before a page is compiled, and the result is published rather than merely filed.

Died
1911
Public domain basis
All quoted material predates 1930 by decades. The holding and hosting institutions either assert no copyright over the underlying nineteenth century record (Harvard Library's public domain reproduction policy, A5) or publish their own text under an open license (MacTutor, CC BY-SA 4.0, A3/A4; the Wolbach Library blog, CC BY 4.0, A6); the 1911 obituary is quoted in the scholarly citation register, not reproduced as an asset.
Estate and licensing screen
Screened 2026-07-28 (web search): no estate, literary rights agent, or family representative was found administering Williamina Fleming's name or papers. Her institutional record is held and served directly by Harvard's successor bodies (Wolbach Library, DASCH), which state she left no single consolidated collection of personal papers.
Trademark screen
Screened 2026-07-28 (web search): no live trademark registration was found for "Williamina Fleming."
Dignity screen
Her 1879 domestic employment in the observatory director's household is stated once, plainly, as the opening fact of her Harvard career, never as pathos. The turn and the declines credit the correction to the institutions' own later publication record (a 1911 obituary that already stated her achievements at length, a Harvard successor library that traced and corrected the 1895 credit line itself), never framing Harvard as a villain, per this figure's dignity note.
Gate stack run
2026-07-28

The machine record

The structured representation this page is built from, printed field by field.

Every row below is a field of this figure's module, printed with its value and the citation key that settles it. Nothing here is summarised or inferred. It is shown as text for a reader: this page emits no machine-readable metadata, and it is excluded from the sitemap, from llms.txt, and from search indexes.

identity

slugwilliamina-fleming
handlewilliamina-fleming
nameWilliamina Fleming
disciplineAstronomy
entered2026-07-28
accent#2E3A78

claims

labelHousemaid in the observatory director's household, then a copyist at duties "of the simplest character." [A3]
turnThe observatory's own 1890 publication named her for the find; five years later, the catalogue that absorbed it named only the director. [A6]
lifespan1857 to 1911 [A1]
statementThis record holds the Harvard College Observatory's own account of Williamina Fleming, who entered its staff in 1881 as "a copyist and computer" and was credited, by the time of her death in 1911, with the discovery of ten novae, fifty nine gaseous nebulae, and more than three hundred variable stars. [A1]

story[7]

story[0]Williamina Fleming was born in Dundee, Scotland, on May 15, 1857. [A1]
story[1]She was employed as a housemaid in the Cambridge household of Harvard College Observatory director Edward C. Pickering beginning in 1879, and entered the Observatory's own staff in 1881, where her early duties are recorded as "copying and ordinary computing." [A3]
story[2]She was put in charge of the original examination of the observatory's photographic plates and assigned the first general photographic classification of stellar spectra, published as the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra and giving, in the institutional record's own phrase, "the spectra of 10,351 stars, with measures of their photographic light." [A1]
story[3]On a plate exposed at Cambridge on February 6, 1888, she recorded the object later named the Horsehead Nebula. Her own notebook describes it: "A large nebulosity extending nearly south from Zeta Orionis for about 60 minutes. More intense and well marked on the following side, with a semicircular indentation." [A6]
story[4]The finding was first published in 1890 under the director's name with credit to her; when it was folded into J. L. E. Dreyer's Index Catalogue of Nebulae in 1895, the entry credited the discovery to "Pickering" alone. [A6]
story[5]The institutional record credits her with the discovery of ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars, of which two hundred twenty two received measured position and light magnitude sequences in her own "Photographic Study of Variable Stars." [A1]
story[6]In 1899 the Harvard Corporation gave her an official position on the Observatory staff as Curator of Astronomical Photographs; she died in Boston on May 21, 1911, of pneumonia. [A1]

schedule[8]

schedule[0] [A1]

span1857
titleBorn
detailBorn in Dundee, Scotland, on May 15, 1857.

schedule[1] [A3]

span1879
titleHired into the director's household
detailEmployed as a housemaid in the Cambridge household of Harvard College Observatory director Edward C. Pickering.

schedule[2] [A1]

span1881
titleJoined the Observatory staff
detailEntered Harvard College Observatory "as a copyist and computer," duties the record calls "at first of the simplest character, copying and ordinary computing."

schedule[3] [A2]

spanFeb 6, 1888
titleRecorded plate b02312
detailExposed a photographic plate at Cambridge with the 8-inch Bache Doublet on which she recorded the nebula later known as the Horsehead.

schedule[4] [A1]

span1890
titleDraper Catalogue published
detailThe classification work assigned to her was published as the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, giving the spectra of 10,351 stars.

schedule[5] [A6]

span1895
titleThe credit line
detailDreyer's Index Catalogue of Nebulae, folding in the 1890 finding, recorded the entry under "Pickering," the director's name alone.

schedule[6] [A1]

span1899
titleCurator of Astronomical Photographs
detailThe Harvard Corporation gave her an official position on the Observatory staff under this title.

schedule[7] [A1]

span1911
titleDied
detailDied in Boston on May 21, 1911, of pneumonia.

figures[5]

figures[0] [A1]

label10,351 stars
detailClassified for the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra, published 1890 as Volumes XXVI and XXVII of the Harvard Annals, "with measures of their photographic light."

figures[1] [A1]

label222 variable stars
detailGiven measured position and light magnitude sequences in her "Photographic Study of Variable Stars," Volume XLVII of the Harvard Annals.

figures[2] [A1]

label59 gaseous nebulae
detailFound by the presence of bright lines in their photographic spectra, per the Astrophysical Journal's 1911 record of her work.

figures[3] [A1]

label10 novae
detailDiscovered by the same method, per the same institutional record.

figures[4] [A1]

label11 subclasses
detailThe number of subclasses into which she divided the spectral combination she used to flag candidate variable stars.

works[4]

works[0] [A1]

titleThe Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra
year1890
notePublished as Volumes XXVI and XXVII of the Harvard Annals; "gives the spectra of 10,351 stars, with measures of their photographic light," the classification work assigned to Fleming.
urlhttps://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1890AnHar..27....1P/abstract

works[1] [A1]

titleA Photographic Study of Variable Stars
year1907
noteVolume XLVII of the Harvard Annals; gives measured positions and light magnitude sequences for 222 of the variable stars she discovered.
urlhttps://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1907AnHar..47....1F/abstract

works[2] [A2]

titleHarvard College Observatory photographic glass plate b02312
year1888
noteThe plate on which she recorded the object later named the Horsehead Nebula; the DASCH digitization reports no markings on the plate beyond its catalogue number.
urlhttps://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates?ids=b2312

works[3] [A6]

titleIndex Catalogue of Nebulae Found in the Years 1888 to 1894
year1895
noteJ. L. E. Dreyer's addition to Herschel's General Catalogue; the entry folding in the 1890 finding credits the nebula to "Pickering" alone, with no first initial.

answers[5]

answers[0] [A6]

qDid Williamina Fleming discover the Horsehead Nebula?
aThe record says yes. On a plate exposed at Cambridge on February 6, 1888, she recorded the object, describing it in her own notebook as a large nebulosity with a semicircular indentation south of Zeta Orionis, the shape now called the Horsehead.

answers[1] [A6]

qWhy does the historical catalogue credit Pickering instead of Fleming?
aThe 1890 publication of the finding named her; when the entry was folded into J. L. E. Dreyer's 1895 Index Catalogue of Nebulae, the credit line read "Pickering," the observatory's director, with no first initial given.

answers[2] [A3]

qDid Fleming really work as a maid in the observatory director's household?
aYes. Before she joined the Harvard College Observatory's own staff in 1881, she was employed as a housemaid in the Cambridge household of director Edward C. Pickering, beginning in 1879.

answers[3] [A1]

qHow many stars are in the Draper Catalogue, and how much of it is Fleming's work?
aThe catalogue, published in 1890 as Volumes XXVI and XXVII of the Harvard Annals, gives the spectra of 10,351 stars; the institutional record states plainly that the classification work "was assigned to Mrs. Fleming."

answers[4] [A1]

qWhat official title did Fleming hold at Harvard?
aIn 1899 the Harvard Corporation gave her an official position on the Observatory staff with the title Curator of Astronomical Photographs.

declines[4]

declines[0] [A2]

mythA widely shared photograph of plate b02312 shows a red circle in ink, taken as a period mark of the discovery.
refusalThe record declines this. No mark of that kind exists on the plate.
checkedThe DASCH plate metadata for b02312 was queried directly on 2026-07-28 and reports has_markings: false; the plate carries only its catalogue number, in dark ink, at the edge. The red circle seen in circulating images is a modern annotation added by a later publisher of the scan, not a period mark.

declines[1] [A6]

mythThe Horsehead Nebula was "discovered by Pickering."
refusalThe record declines this framing. The observation on the plate is Fleming's; the credit line that survives into the standard catalogue is a later editorial choice, not a record of who found it.
checkedThe Wolbach Library's published account of the publication history was checked: the 1890 Annals volume that first announced the finding credited Fleming by name; Dreyer's 1895 Index Catalogue of Nebulae, entry No. 434, folded it in under "Pickering" alone.

declines[2] [A6]

mythThe 1895 catalogue entry names "W. H. Pickering," the director's brother, rather than the director himself.
refusalThe record declines to supply an initial that is not there.
checkedThe credit line as recorded by the Wolbach Library reads "Pickering" with no first name or initial attached; the observatory's director at the time, whose 1890 Annals volume the entry draws from, was Edward C. Pickering.

declines[3] [A1]

mythWilliamina Fleming, the Harvard astronomer, is the same person as Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered penicillin.
refusalThe record declines the conflation. They share only a surname.
checkedWilliamina Fleming died in Boston on May 21, 1911, of pneumonia, per the Astrophysical Journal's obituary of that year; the bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, unrelated, died in 1955, a date this record does not otherwise reference.

sources[8]

sources.A1 [A1]

clsA
institutionAmerican Astronomical Society / NASA Astrophysics Data System
titleWilliamina Paton Fleming (obituary), Astrophysical Journal 34 (1911), pp. 314 to 317
urlhttps://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1911ApJ....34..314C&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf
accessed2026-07-28
rights© American Astronomical Society. Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

sources.A2 [A2]

clsA
institutionDASCH / StarGlass, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Harvard Plate Stacks)
titlePlate b02312 metadata record
urlhttps://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates?ids=b2312
accessed2026-07-28
rightsNo separate rights statement is published at this API endpoint; public domain reproduction of the underlying plate follows the Harvard Library policy recorded in this record's sources (see A5).

sources.A3 [A3]

clsA
institutionMacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
titleWilliamina Paton Fleming (biography), by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
urlhttps://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fleming/
accessed2026-07-28
rightsExcept where otherwise noted, the text of MacTutor by JOC/EFR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

sources.A4 [A4]

clsA
institutionMacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews (reproducing the Royal Astronomical Society's obituary)
titleWilliamina Paton Fleming, Royal Astronomical Society obituary (Monthly Notices, 1912)
urlhttps://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Obituaries/Fleming_RAS/
accessed2026-07-28
rightsExcept where otherwise noted, the text of MacTutor by JOC/EFR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

sources.A5 [A5]

clsA
institutionHarvard Library
titlePolicy on Access to Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain
urlhttps://library.harvard.edu/about/policies/policy-access-digital-reproductions-works-public-domain
accessed2026-07-28
rightsHarvard Library asserts no copyright over digital reproductions of works in its collections which are in the public domain, where those digital reproductions are made openly available on Harvard Library websites; Harvard Library does not charge for permission to use those reproductions and requests appropriate citation to the source of reproductions.

sources.A6 [A6]

clsA
institutionWolbach Library, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
titleThe First Computer: Williamina Fleming and the Horsehead Nebula, by Alex McGrath (Galactic Gazette blog, archived copy)
urlhttps://zenodo.org/records/8336178
accessed2026-07-28
rightsThe Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited (CC BY 4.0).

sources.A7 [A7]

clsA
institutionInternet Archive, digitized from the copy held by the University of California Libraries
titleThe Draper catalogue of stellar spectra photograhed with the 8-inch Bache telescope as a part of the Henry Draper memorial (Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, Vol. XXVII), printed page 27
urlhttps://archive.org/details/drapercatalogueo00harvrich
accessed2026-07-29
rightsPossible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT. Copyright region: US. Copyright evidence: Evidence reported by ian white for item drapercatalogueo00harvrich on March 13, 2007: no visible notice of copyright; stated date is 1890.

sources.A8 [A8]

clsA
institutionInternet Archive, from its own microfilm digitization of the journal (collection sim_microfilm). The scan is NOT served by a named holding library, and that is recorded here rather than smoothed over: it is the weakest provenance in this bibliography, and it is used for one thing only, the wording of a paper she signed.
titleW. P. Fleming, "A Field for Woman's Work in Astronomy", Astronomy and Astro-Physics, Volume 12, Number 8, October 1893, pages 683 to 689, bylined on the page "MRS. M. FLEMING.", footnoted "Read at the Congress of Astronomy and Astro-Physics, Chicago, August, 1893" and signed at the end "HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY, Cambridge, Mass., August 4, 1893". Pages 684 and 688 were read at the full size page images.
urlhttps://archive.org/details/sim_astronomy-and-astro-physics_1893-10_12_8
accessed2026-07-29
rightsThe item publishes no rights, licence, usage or copyright status field at all: the metadata fields are absent, and the details page carries no rights line. That absence is recorded here as exactly that. The paper was published in the United States in 1893 and is out of copyright by date. The NASA Astrophysics Data System holds no scan of this article (its PDF service returned an access denial on 2026-07-29), and the Harvard served Annals volume 47 carries no text layer, so neither could be used.

clearance

died1911
diedSrcA1
pdBasisAll quoted material predates 1930 by decades. The holding and hosting institutions either assert no copyright over the underlying nineteenth century record (Harvard Library's public domain reproduction policy, A5) or publish their own text under an open license (MacTutor, CC BY-SA 4.0, A3/A4; the Wolbach Library blog, CC BY 4.0, A6); the 1911 obituary is quoted in the scholarly citation register, not reproduced as an asset.
estateScreened 2026-07-28 (web search): no estate, literary rights agent, or family representative was found administering Williamina Fleming's name or papers. Her institutional record is held and served directly by Harvard's successor bodies (Wolbach Library, DASCH), which state she left no single consolidated collection of personal papers.
trademarkScreened 2026-07-28 (web search): no live trademark registration was found for "Williamina Fleming."
dignityHer 1879 domestic employment in the observatory director's household is stated once, plainly, as the opening fact of her Harvard career, never as pathos. The turn and the declines credit the correction to the institutions' own later publication record (a 1911 obituary that already stated her achievements at length, a Harvard successor library that traced and corrected the 1895 credit line itself), never framing Harvard as a villain, per this figure's dignity note.
checkedAt2026-07-28

HISTORICAL RECORD · A DEMONSTRATION

A demonstration record, compiled from public archives. Every line on this page carries its source. Williamina Fleming did not write it; the institutions cited here did.

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