John Thayer

John Eliot Thayer (April 3, 1862 – July 29, 1933) was an American amateur ornithologist. Early life Thayer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 3, 1862. He was a son of Cornelia Paterson (née Van Rensselaer) Thayer (1823–1897) and Nathaniel Thayer Jr., a banker who built Harvard's Thayer Hall. Among his siblings were twin brother Bayard Thayer (yachtsman and horticulturalist), older brother Nathaniel Thayer III (a banker and railroad executive), and sister Cornelia Van Rensselaer Thayer (the wife of New York State Senator J. Hampden Robb). His maternal grandparents were Stephen Van Rensselaer IV (the 10th Patroon and 7th Lord of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck) and Harriet Elizabeth (née Bayard) Van Rensselaer. His paternal grandparents were Sarah Parker (née Toppan) Thayer and the Rev. Dr. Nathaniel Thayer, a Unitarian congregational minister from Lancaster, Massachusetts. Through his father, he was descended from John Cotton, the preeminent minister and theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Career After graduating from Harvard, he married and settled at the family farm at Lancaster, thirty-five miles west of Boston. He became interested in ornithology in the mid-1890s, building up a collection which he housed in a museum in the main street of Lancaster.