30 of 100: "Overlooked": NYT obituaries

I was searching for information about the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who is mentioned in Martyr!, and came across a New York Times obituary from 2019—and yet, she died in 1967. A header to the obit states: "Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times."

This regular feature—it appears every week—was launched in March 2018. As that opening article stated, 

The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones. 

Charlotte Brontë wrote “Jane Eyre”; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now.

Indeed, "Overlooked" is a stunning chronicle of lives lived—of history and accomplishment. It includes individuals whose names I know—in addition to Charlotte Brontë, for example, there's Diane Arbus, Beatrix Potter, Sylvia Plath, and Henrietta Lacks—but so many more I've just spent a fascinated few hours learning about, from many times and places. Mostly women, but also men; many white, but more often not.

And rather than simply obituaries, they are often commentaries on society at the time: the gift of hindsight. The entry for Margaret Abbott, for example, the first American woman to win an Olympic championship, in 1900 in Paris (and who died not knowing it), is a nice little history lesson on the Games. And that for Ada Lovelace, now recognized as "the first computer programmer," has all of computer history to situate her in, which would not have been the case in 1852 when she died. (She was only rediscovered in the mid-20th century.)

Anyway, I will not list all the remarkable people who are finally given their due. I just wanted to mention "Overlooked" here as a way of keeping it in mind for myself, with a link to go see who I should know about this week. (This week, it's Willy de Bruyn [1914–1989], a Belgian cyclist who broke records as a woman but who in his early twenties transitioned to being a man, giving up athletics and all but disappearing from view.)