Marston Abbott Frazar was born in 1859 in Massachusetts to George Frazar and Caroline Marston Frazar (Sampson). He was one of four children. As an adult, he lived in Watertown, MA.
In 1886, he went on the first of many collecting trips for William Brewster, who was the specimen curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Like many other institutions at the time, the Museum of Comparative Zoology sent collectors to specific parts of the country and the world to bring back as many specimens as possible.
For example, on one expedition for Brewster in the southern part of Baja California, he was able to collect and prepare 4,400 specimens in a nine-month period. Brewster wrote, in a scientific paper, that he was very pleased with the number of skins Frazar had collected but that he was disappointed that he had not collected enough eggs, nests, or documentation of the birds and their locations.
In 1888, during a collection expedition to Sonora and Chihuahua, Frazar collected an Imperial Woodpecker specimen. He became so disillusioned with collecting specimens during this trip that he sent in his resignation to Brewster; however, he changed his mind several months later and returned for additional collection expeditions. Brewster and a few other naturalists noticed, though, that Frazar collected a diminishing number of birds during these expeditions. A few years after he shot the last Passenger Pigeon he ever saw, Frazar stopped collecting birds altogether.
After completing his expeditions, Frazar returned to Boston, where he started a business specializing in taxidermy and sales of naturalist supplies.
In 1890, at the age of thirty, he married Helen F. and the couple had one child, Nelson A. Frazar.
Source: Book – Extinct Birds Project by Alberto Rey, pgs. 115-118
