Fidelia Heard

Fidelia Reed Heard (August 13, 1822 – February 22, 1895) was an American captain's wife who made important initial contributions to research on Heard Island, an Antarctic island, now part of Australia's Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands. The island is named for her husband, Captain John Jay Heard, who alongside Fidelia is credited with first spotting the landmass on November 25, 1853. The island's Fidelia Isthmus is named for Fidelia herself. The two had recently married, a few years after the death of John's first wife, and the trip was treated as their honeymoon. On the voyage, she began assisting the captain and learned to take maritime measurements. "At 10 o'clock the Captain was walking on deck and saw what he supposed to be an immense iceberg. … the atmosphere was hazy, and then a heavy snow squall came up which shut it out entirely from our view. Not long after the sun shone again, and I went up again and with the glass, tried to get an outline of it to sketch its form. The sun seemed so dazzling on the water, and the tops of the apparent icebergs covered with snow; the outline was very indistinct. We were all the time nearing the object and on looking again the Captain pronounced it to be land. The Island is not laid down on the chart, neither is it in the Epitome, so we are perhaps the discoverers, … I think it must be a twin to Desolation Island, it is certainly a frigid looking place."Fidelia also made the first known drawings of the landform. A 1990 expedition to the island found that Fidelia's initial survey "proved remarkably accurate." The research material she compiled on their voyage has continued to be used by scholars, and it is now held in the Scott Polar Research Institute Archives at the University of Cambridge.

Captain Heard's mental health deteriorated and he died on October 13, 1862, at the Boston Lunatic Asylum. His cause of death was recorded as "mania (four years)." Fidelia, with two young children to provide for, turned to teaching. A notice placed in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1860 advertised a "Vacation school for Misses and small children, will be kept by Mrs. J. J. Heard, in Concord Hall during the summer vacation [...] Terms fifty cents per week." By 1861, she was running a kindergarten with the patronage of Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale.

Although Elizabeth Peabody, who lectured and wrote extensively on early childhood education, is usually credited with opening the first kindergarten in Boston, the Boston Evening Transcript, in an article published soon after Mrs. Heard's death in 1895, acknowledged her as the "pioneer" of the kindergarten movement: