American teacher, farm owner and botanist in Iowa. Robert Cratty was born in Butler County, Pennsylvania, to a farming family and began his education there before moving to Rochelle, Illinois, at the age of ten. In 1877 he arrived in Iowa, first living in Algona and later settling in Armstrong. Here Cratty began to teach, a profession he engaged in for 21 years while simultaneously owning his own successful farm. Between 1880 and 1884 he served as principal of a school in Estherville and as well as a loyal member of the Presbyterian Church, he was also a township clerk and trustee.

Pursuing botany as a hobby (particularly in later life when he visited the laboratories and libraries of Iowa State College), and in 1918 Cratty was offered the position of herbarium curator at this institution which he undertook until his retirement in 1932. He collected an extensive herbarium of Iowa and Minnesota plants, numbering some 8,000 specimens, which he presented to the aforementioned herbarium when he became its curator.

Having studied the flora of his home state for much of his life, Cratty published numerous papers on this subject, particularly with regards to the sedges and rushes. His most important papers include "The Iowa Sedges" (1898) and "The Juncaceae of Iowa" (1905). Other publications of his include a flora of Emmet County (1904) and "The Immigrant Flora of Iowa" (1929). A member of the Iowa Conservation Society and the Iowa Academy of Science, he served the latter as president in 1925-1926. Cratty was married to Lovela Estelle Cannon with whom he had four children, but after her death in 1896 he re-married to Mollie E. Webster.

Sources:
A. Hayden, 1940, "In Memoriam: Robert Irvin Cratty (1853-1940)", Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Sciences, 47: 31-34
F.A. Stafleu and R.S. Cowan, 1976-1998, Taxonomic Literature, 2nd edition (TL-2), 4: 450-451
Emmet County, Iowa, Biographies C-D, IAGenWeb Project:
http://iagenweb.org/emmet/biocd.htm#CRATTY,%20Robert%20Irvin, accessed 20 April 2011.