Gardner, Emelyn Elizabeth (1872–1967). Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Folklore collector and educator. Born in central New York state, Gardner devoted most
of her professional life to teaching students at Wayne State University in Detroit,
Michigan. Her pioneering work with immigrant folklore in urban Detroit is the
foundation for the Folklore Archives at Wayne State University, which Gardner founded
in 1939 with collections of Armenian, Italian, Polish, and Finnish lore.
Gardner became interested in the folklore of rural New York state through the tales
told by a laborer on her father’s central New York farm. Trained originally to teach high
school, Gardner taught for five years in rural Schoharie County, New York. After
receiving an A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1902, and inspired by the thencurrent literary approaches to folklore scholarship, Gardner returned to Schoharie County
to collect its folklore. This material formed the basis for her master’s thesis (University of
Michigan, 1915) and was published in book form as Folklore from the Schoharie Hills,
New York (1937).
Gardner joined the faculty at Ypsilanti State College; in 1918 she moved to Wayne
State University, where she spent the remainder of her professional career. During her
twenty-four years of teaching folklore and children’s literature at Wayne State, Gardner
inspired many students to pursue the study of folklore and to collect the folklore of their
own communities.
Gardner’s collecting has been lauded for its inclusiveness and scope. While criticized
for the absence of some contextual information, her Ballads and Songs of Southern
Michigan (1939), compiled with her student Geraldine Jencks Chickering, was
noteworthy for its time for the addition of biographical information on informants and the
thoroughness of documentation.
Ellen McHale

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