In 2019, the United States Postal Service announced that Mary Golda Ross would be honored on an American Forever stamp.

The stamp was part of a series called “American Scientists,” and it depicted her with mathematical notation and the suggestion of celestial bodies in the background.

It was a posthumous recognition, issued eleven years after her death — which is, in the context of postal service commemorations of scientific figures, not particularly unusual.

What the stamp represented, beyond its surface content, was the crystallization of a recovery process that had been underway for several decades.

The recovery of Mary Ross’s story — the piecing together of what could be documented from Lockheed records, from colleagues’ accounts, from the technical publications she was listed on, from the interviews she had given in retirement — was the result of sustained work by historians, educators, journalists, and advocates who believed that the record deserved to be more complete.