RANDERS-PEHRSON, Justine Davis 1910-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born May 18, 1910, in Leavenworth, KS; died from a heart attack September 2, 2004, in Hamden, CT. Library catalogue specialist and author. Randers-Pehrson worked in various government libraries but was better known for her books on history and genealogy. Interested in many subjects, she earned a B.A. from Hood College in 1931 and a master's degree in philosophy from Radcliffe in 1932. She also studied philosophy while at Harvard University and took sociology classes at Howard University during the 1960s. Her broad interests and fluency in German and French helped qualify her as an adept library cataloguer and subject headings and classifications specialist. She worked in this capacity for the U.S. Library of Congress during the late 1930s, for the U.S. National Library of Medicine in the 1950s, and for the U.S. Office of Technical Services from 1958 to 1960. During the 1960s, Randers-Pehrson was a translator for the U.S. Patent Office, later becoming a freelancer in the field. She found a great deal of satisfaction, too, in traveling and conducting research for her various books. These include Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, A.D. 400-700 (1983), Germans and the Revolution of 1848-1849 (1999), and Adolf Douai, 1819-1888: The Turbulent Life of a German Forty-eighter in the Homeland and in the United States (2000).

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Washington Post, September 11, 2004, p. B7.