Collector of African American folklore of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Born in Massachusetts, Holmes moved to South Carolina with her abolitionist parents during the Civil War. She published stories and a book of African American dialect tales in the 1870s and 1890s and was a proponent of the African origins of Southern Black folklore. Holmes heard the stories of Br’er Rabbit and the others of “de beastises” told by formerly enslaved African Americans as she matured into adulthood in Beaufort, South Carolina. While a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she published “De Wolf, de Rabbit, an’ de Tar Baby” in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1874. Thereafter, she contributed several tales in the Sea Island dialect to the New York Independent. After she married in 1875, she wrote under the name Mrs. A.M.H.Christensen. In 1892 Christensen published a collection of dialect stories entitled Afro American Folk Lore Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. She belonged briefly to the American Folklore Society and wrote a paper on African American spirituals and shouts that was read at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and published in the Journal of American Folklore the following year. Christensen believed she should use the profits from the sale of her book on behalf of African Americans. Starting with a modest sum, she worked with other Whites and Blacks to found the Port Royal Agricultural School for African Americans in 1902. Christensen was also an early advocate of women’s suffrage, temperance, and socialism. Monica M.Tetzlaff