Tony Frates' photostream  

It is because of the EOL project and the TNC collection that I started to participate on Flickr (my primary interest with respect to Flickr is in connection with botany, ecology and related conservation). I am the project coordinator for the Utah Rare Plant Guide, have been involved with the Utah Native Plant Society since 1981, and have had a strong interest in botany (for reasons that are hard to explain) and the natural world for a long time. While Flickr is a social networking site in a general sense, it can be used with a specific purpose in mind and has proven to be a valuable aid to better understand the natural world (e.g. to document what species look like, and to see how they vary at different times of year and in different places). To understand the present and try to make any sense of the future, we must understand the past (our own personal past as well as that of our planet and the natural processes that formed it). Only in this way can we reveal what is true, and expose perhaps some of the reality of our existence.

The name "Frates" at least in my case is a corruption of "de Freitas" (Portuguese) fairly recently. My great grandfather was Francisco (later Frank) de Freitas (born Dec. 8, 1959 in Flores, Azores Islands, Portugal - he was the younger Francisco in a family of nine that included another Francisco born in 1835). His father (my great great grandfather) was Antonio Joseph de Freitas (my namesake, i.e. Anthony) born in 1810 or 1815. His wife was Mariana Fortada (or might have Fortado or Furtada/Furtada). (Another son, Antonio Jose, born in 1843, emigrated to New Zealand circa 1865). Francisco #2 migrated to the United States via the ports of California and that is where the spelling of the name "Freitas" became "Frates." Ultimately he made his way to Park City, Utah where he was married in 1886 to Huldean Johnson. He was a well-known miner and in the summer had a far near Millcreek Canyon. He and Huldean had eight children one of whom was James Frates, my grandather, born in Park City in 1905. He ans his wife Sylvia had three children, one of whom was my father and who was born in Salt Lake City, James R. Frates (1929-1981).

It is an interesting and happy coincidence that I have ancestors from the Island of Flores (which means "flowers" and relates apparently to the hydrangeas that grow there) and I happen to have a lifelong interest in botany.