Frank Thomas Siebert, Jr. (1912-1998) was a student of the Penobscot Indians’ language and drafted an Penobscot dictionary in 1984 which contained nearly 15,000 entries of this Native American tribe’s vocabulary.
Siebert was a pathologist, self-taught linguist and collector of books on North American Indians and the American frontier. He was dedicated to preserving the Penobscot language. After retiring as a medical doctor in the 1970’s, he moved to Old Town to pursue his interest in researching the Penobscot language.
Though he had no formal training, he attended linguistic courses at Columbia and Yale and published research which expanded scholarly knowledge of the Algonquian language.
Additional resources
“Frank T. Siebert, Jr. (1912-1998) A Special Issue.” Maine History. Winter, 1998.
Siebert, Frank T. Penobscot Dictionary. 198-?. [University of Maine, Raymond H. Fogler Library, Special Collections]
Siebert, Frank T. Penobscot and Algonquian Related Notes of Frank T. Siebert. 1934-1964. (Cataloger Note: Bryant Richard Garrett, the donor of the collection, worked closely with Dr. Siebert and carries on the work of documenting and preserving the Penobscot language. Collection contains photocopies of notebooks compiled by Frank T. Siebert in his study of the language of the Penobscot Indians in Maine.) [University of Maine, Raymond H. Fogler Library, Special Collections]