Frederick van der Plaars

"Dearest Oona, our tender nights of passion are burned upon my soul! Your Lovely Vandy XOX"

- Inscription on a photograph of Dr. van der Plaars.

Dr. Frederick van der Plaars is an authority on anthropolgy, being the curator of North American Archaeology and Ethnology at the Metropolitan Museum of Man in New York, and the author of Yunni Cosmogony: Being a Brief Ethnography of a New Mexican Pueblo Tribe (1881).

Dr. van der Plaars spent some months in 1881 in Diamondback, New Mexico, studying the habits of the Yunni indian tribe.

He returned to Diamondback in around 1912. Willie von Haderlitz, associate professor at the University of Vienna booked passage on the RMS Titanic to aid him in his studies, though the young man perished in the voyage.