Lena Artz is one of many thousands of individuals who documented the plant biodiversity of the southeastern United States in the mid-20th century. But her accomplishments as a pioneering explorer of the Massanutten Mountains, which were uncovered only because of ongoing herbarium digitization in Virginia, is a case study of how interrogating the legacies of poorly known collectors can advance botanical research in the present day. In 2019, the collection notebooks and professional papers of Lena Artz were discovered during the salvage of the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium. Despite being occasionally acknowledged in print as an early contributor to knowledge about Central Appalachian shale barren ecosystems, Lena Artz's biography and her professional accomplishments were largely undocumented at the time of the discovery. This presentation describes how archival research, gumshoe detective work, and the curation of Artz’s ca. 2000 sheet exsiccatae across multiple institutions have worked synergistically to uncover the life and life’s work of this hidden figure in botany. The results provide insight on why she, like many other collectors whose collections inhabit museums and databases, become forgotten. The results also reveal the time-value of her collections for contemporary studies of rare, threatened and endangered plant species, for capturing the biodiversity of landscapes long since destroyed, and for informing studies of global climate change. Lastly, I show how Bionomia can be used as a tool to improve digital data about specimens across institutions using the curation of Artz’s exsiccatae as an example. I argue that assigning universal unique ID’s to historical collectors and appending these to their digitized specimen records is a tractable challenge for the herbarium community to meet that not only will help us achieve the vision of the extended specimen concept but will make collections-based research more inclusive in the 21st century.