Frank Barna Bigelow

Frank Barna Bigelow (7 February 1869 – 30 May 1949) was an American librarian.

Frank Barna was born at Amherst, Massachusetts, Feb. 7, 1869, third child of six of prominent Amherst physician Orvis Furman Bigelow, M.D. and Mary Helen (Pingry) Bigelow; grandson of Judge William Morrill Pingry of Vermont; and nephew of California Forty-niner Adoniram Judson Biglow [this branch of the singularly-related Bigelow/Biglow family was dropping the "e" in the name around this time], having sailed on a clipper ship around Cape Horn which docked in San Francisco on 10 October 1849. (Adoniram was a pioneer apiarist who brought the first European honey bee queens to California and was thus instrumental in helping establish the agriculture industry in California, as well as later reclaiming with partner C. E. Upham the first of the islands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta, Sherman Island.) Frank Barna was educated at the schools of Amherst and was graduated from Amherst College in 1891.

In February 1892, he was appointed assistant librarian at the Columbia College library, and in May 1895, transferred his services to the New York Society Library to succeed Wentworth S. Butler as head librarian. He held that post until 1937, after which he was made librarian emeritus. The New York Society Library, New York City's oldest library, founded in 1754, served as the de facto library of Congress in the first years of the Constitution until the establishment of the Library of Congress on 24 April 1800 by an act of Congress.

Frank Barna was a ninth-generation American, descended from the fifth child, Samuel, of John Biglow and Mary Warren, the first couple recorded married in 1642 in the annals of the then new town of Watertown, Massachusetts, located up the Charles River from Boston and immediately west of Cambridge. John and Mary arrived circa 1630 on the Winthrop ships as part of the migration from East Anglia in England which founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston).

Frank Barna was also a fifth cousin twice removed to extremely prominent John Bigelow, the first President in 1895 of the newly created New York Public Library; John was descended from the sixth child Joshua of John Biglo and Mary Warren and was a markedly talented person of his day.