[4] Her great-grandfathers worked as commission agents and her maternal grandfather made his wealth through "slavery, sugar, and rum," also building China's first trading outpost, where he imported silks and opium.

[6] Mary's mother, Sarah, was close friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson,[4] who often visited the family's home.

[7] She was well-traveled, visiting Europe, Egypt, and California with her parents, who were "protective" and raised Wheelwright as how a friend described as "growing up in cotton wool.

"[8] As the heiress of a family trust, she had significant income that would support her throughout her life but lacked control of the capital, which was intended to protect her from "fortune-hunting suitors" but made her unable to endow the museum she would later found as she wished.

[8] At age 40, after both her parents had died, Wheelwright journeyed to the American Southwest, where she "found and embraced a more primitive type of civilization, more adventuresome and more exciting than the safety of Boston.

[5] While at the time, there was a taboo in the Navajo community against replicating ceremonies, Klah's fear of the knowledge of his culture's traditions being lost led him to share the information with Wheelwright.

[2] In 1942 the museum published Navajo Creation Myth - the Story of the Emergence by Hosteen Klah, Recorded by Mary C.

[2] An excerpt was published in A Quilt of Words: Women's Diaries, Letters & Original Accounts of Life in the Southwest, 1860–1960 in 1988.