Last week, hundreds of people were engaged in a search for a woman named Sheila.

It began when an illustrator’s investigation into the archives of marine legislation turned into a very different kind of historical deep dive.

Candace Jean Andersen wanted to write a picture book about the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, so she asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for some information.

It sent her an article on the subject. There, buried in dozens of pages of dense text, was a photograph of attendees at the 1971 International Conference on the Biology of Whales in Virginia, a gathering of some of the most prominent experts in marine biology. The 38 people pictured appeared to be mostly white and all men, except for one: a young Black woman wearing a bright headband, her face partly obscured by the man in front of her.

Andersen said the men were named in a caption but the woman was not. “My curiosity nagged at me, not knowing who the woman in the photo was, or perhaps what she may have contributed to the conference,” she said.

How do you identify a person when all you have is half of a smiling face in a 47-year-old black-and-white photo?

You turn to social media.

“Hey Twitter,” Andersen wrote in a post on March 9. “I’m on a mission.”

After she posted the photo, hundreds of people replied with comments and suggestions.

The thread caught the attention of Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the book Hidden Figures, which was made into a 2016 film about Black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race.

“Here’s a working scientist, contributing alongside her colleagues, and she’s not even given the professional courtesy of having her name recorded at a scientific conference,” Shetterly said Sunday. “The photo, with her brown face half obscured by the people around her, is a perfect metaphor for the larger issue of history’s failure to record the work of women scientists, particularly women scientists of colour.”

Inspired by Andersen’s post, amateur researchers began combing through historical records and unearthing the names of women who worked in the sciences during the 1970s.

Maybe, some suggested, the photo was of the oceanographer, professor and lawyer Matilene Spencer Berryman, who died in 2003? Or perhaps it was Suzanne Contos, who helped organize the conference in 1971? (It was neither. Berryman’s age did not seem to match the photo, and Contos said it was not her.)

Then Dee Allen, the research program officer at the Marine Mammal Commission, saw the photograph on Twitter and contacted some of her mentors.

“I figured it was probably something I could track down pretty easily, and I have an appreciation for the history of the field,” Allen said. She contacted Don Wilson, the emeritus curator of mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Wilson remembered. He told Allen that the woman had worked as a museum technician, and her name was Sheila.

“Sheila was working at the museum in the division of mammals when I first started there in September 1971,” Wilson said, adding that she was “an excellent technician.”

Allen gave the information to Andersen, who began to look for Sheila on social media.

By March 12, she had found her. Andersen revealed that Sheila’s original surname was Minor and posted snippets of their conversation, in which the woman said she had worked in several federal agencies for 35 years and “loved every moment of my career.”

The discovery was cheered by Andersen’s Twitter followers, and by Shetterly, who said it was “critically important” to tell the stories of people like Sheila who have historically been under-represented, “as the leaky pipeline exists in the history of science and technology as well as in its present.”

On Sunday, Sheila said her full name is Sheila Minor Huff. She lives in Virginia and is a retired 71-year-old grandmother of five who belly-dances and volunteers at her church.

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Huff said she began working as an animal technician shortly after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology. When she applied for her first job at the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, she was asked to work as a typist. “I said, ‘No, I went to school too long to be your secretary!’” she recalled.

Huff said she went on to complete a master’s degree while working full time. She went to the Soviet Union to attend a conference for mammalogists. She worked with top government officials on a range of wildlife and environmental projects. By the time she retired, at 58, she had become a GS-14 federal employee — one of the highest designations possible — at the Department of the Interior.

She said she was not too bothered about going unnamed in the 1971 snapshot.

“It’s kind of like, no big deal,” she said. “When I try to do good, when I try and add back to this wonderful Earth that we have, when I try to protect it, does it matter that anybody knows my name?”

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