Kate Stephens
Kate Brown Stephens was an American naturalist and the curator of mollusks and marine invertebrates at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1910 to 1936. Biography Stephens was born in London, England. Her father, Thomas Brown, was a cab driver; her mother, Mary Tyler Brown, died when Kate was in her late teens or early twenties. Helping to raise her younger brother George while the family lived in the Kensington area of London, Kate is said to have worked at the Natural History Museum. She immigrated to the United States around 1888-1890. She lived for a short time in the city of San Diego, working as a dressmaker, before moving out to the Witch Creek area in eastern San Diego County, where she may have taught school. In 1898, she married ornithologist and mammalogist Frank Stephens and began working with him as a collector and naturalist. Her early field work included collecting butterflies, but her research interest area was shells and fossils, and she became known as the authority on terrestrial and marine mollusks of the San Diego region. Stephens accompanied her husband on many collecting trips in the early 1900s, including a four-month expedition in 1902 to the