North American botanist. Yuncker was a taxonomist best known for his work on the Piperaceae family, in which he described 839 new species. Truman G. Yuncker (known as T.G.) was born on a farm near Carson City, Michigan, moving to Lansing at the age of 13. His father taken ill, Yuncker was forced to leave school and work to support his family. Employed as a trolley bus conductor, he attended secretarial school at night before enrolling at Michigan Agricultural College in 1907 to study engineering. His studies were interrupted, however, by the need to earn money for his family and so he became a secretary at a carriage company, where he met his future wife, Ethel Burnett Claflin.

When Yuncker returned to university in 1911 (majoring in botany and horticulture), his wife followed and began studies at Michigan State University herself. After Yuncker's master's degree at the University of Nebraska, they married in 1915 and moved to Indianapolis, where Yuncker taught at a high school. In 1916 the couple began PhDs at the University of Illinois, Yuncker undertaking a revision of the North American and West Indian species of Cuscuta. He later took up the specialism of his supervisor, William Trelease, the Piperaceae. Before long, however, he was called upon to play his part in World War I and served in the army medical corps as a bacteriologist, based in Washington D.C.

In 1919 he was awarded his doctorate and went on to join the faculty of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he was appointed head of the botany and bacteriology department in 1924. He served a 35-year tenure at the university, during which time he helped to build up its herbarium with his bryologist colleague, Winona Welch. After his retirement in 1956 he continued as a curator in the herbarium. After his death Welch named the DePauw herbarium in his honour, the Truman G. Yuncker Herbarium. The herbarium was transferred to New York Botanical Garden in 1987.

In the year of William Trelease's death, 1946, Yuncker was invited to complete the Illinois professor's unfinished work on the Piperaceae of northern South America, for which he revised and edited all of Trelease's notes and prepared 675 photographs. Among Yuncker's many achievements were extensive botanical explorations in search of Piperaceae, floristic works on the Pacific islands Niue and Samoa, studies in Jamaica and several productive trips with his students to Honduras in the 1930s. He spent a sabbatical year at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Hawaii in 1932, collected in Cuba in 1948, in the Tonga Islands in 1953-54 and studied Brazilian Piperaceae in 1957-1962, contributing towards his last major work, The Piperaceae of Brazil (1972-1975), completed with the help of his wife. Ethel Yuncker, despite the success she could easily have had pursuing her own career, devoted much of her working life to assisting her husband, mounting herbarium specimens and even taking over many of Yuncker's teaching and departmental duties while he was in Hawaii.

T.G. and Ethel Yuncker played an active role in the local community and were both Freemasons. Yuncker found he could meet fellow Masons with whom to socialise just about anywhere he travelled. His approachable, gregarious and generous personality was much appreciated by his students as well as fellow Masons, and he served as president of the Indiana Academy of Science and the Botanical Society of America. He was injured in a hit-and-run accident in Rio de Janeiro on his last botanical excursion, from which his family believed he never fully recovered. He died in 1964, nearly a year after suffering a heart attack, survived by his wife and two daughters.

Sources:
Anon., 1989, ✢Biographical Sketch of Truman G. Yuncker✢, Brittonia, 41(3): 216-218
J. Goode, 1989, ✢The Yunckers of Greencastle✢, Brittonia, 41(3): 193-210
New York Botanical Garden, Truman G. Yuncker Papers:
http://library.nybg.org/finding_guide/archv/yuncker_ppf.html
W. Welch, 1964, ✢Truman G. Yuncker, 1891-1964✢, Taxon, 13(6): 189-192.