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    Blandina Dudley (Bleecker)

    Birth: 10-1-1783

    Death: 3-6-1863

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Biography

Wife of Charles Edward Dudley, US Senator from New York.

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Biography and Citation Information:
Biography: 
Wife of Charles Edward Dudley, US Senator from New York.
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Biography: 
Blandina Bleecker Dudley reached for the stars and boldly went where no woman in 19th-century America had gone before. The benefit of her philanthropy in terms of scientific understanding of the movement of stars was, in a word, astronomical. Between the 1870s and 1950s, astronomers at the world-class Dudley Observatory accurately determined the positions and motions of more than 30,000 stars and produced two major reference works that became standard texts for stargazers around the globe. Blandina was a descendant of early settlers, the Bleeckers, one of Albany’s prominent Dutch families. Her British-born husband, Charles Edward Dudley, rose from Albany mayor in 1821 to state senator to U.S. senator. His political connections enhanced his career as a banker and he became president of the Mechanics’ and Farmers’ Bank in Albany. He died in 1841. Widowed and childless, she donated a substantial portion of her husband’s estate, more than $105,000 in the 1850s (roughly $3 million today). Her largesse created one of the earliest and most renowned observatories in the country as a memorial to her husband, who was fascinated by exploration of the night sky. The Dudley Observatory was chartered by the state Legislature in 1852. The first observatory was built the following year on a hillside in North Albany. In 1857, an astronomer using a special telescopic device discovered a comet that was named for a donor and financial adviser to Blandina, Thomas Olcott. In the early 1900s, the Dudley Observatory’s research was supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and it operated a second facility in San Luis, Argentina. An early forerunner of the computer, an 1860s device known as the Scheutz difference engine, an astronomical calculator, is now housed in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The Dudley Observatory churned along, aided by Blandina’s $50,000 endowment, and relocated to Nott Terrace in Schenectady on the edge of the campus of Union College, with which the observatory was long affiliated. Its astronomers became world leaders in the 1960s and 1970s of the study of micrometeorites, tiny particles from outer space that streaked through the atmosphere and peppered the earth. As technology advanced and the costs of astronomy soared, the Dudley Observatory changed its mission in 1976 from research to education. Recently, the organization merged with the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schnectady, or miSci, with transfer of Dudley’s archives and historic telescopes nearly complete. Blandina died in 1863 at 80, and she is immortalized in a marble bas-relief by noted sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. She is buried in a family plot on Section 61, Lot 1 along Middle Ridge Road, with a soaring Gothic-style brownstone obelisk carved with her family’s lineage, which includes the name of Anneke Jantz Bogardus, who once owned 62 acres in lower Manhattan
Citation for Birth Info:
Citation Type: 
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Citation URL: 
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=53587665
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Citation for Death Info:
Citation Type: 
Website
Citation URL: 
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=53587665
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findagrave.com
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Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - 10:00
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Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - 10:00