CARLOS A. FREEMAN

Freeman

Carlos Freeman with  Jimmie (center) and Marie Angel in the Campof Captain 

Felix Cardona at the headwaters of the Caura River, 1939.              

 

“Biography and Loving Tribute to our Stepfather Carlos A. Freeman,” by Elizabeth Graham Marsh Christian and Diana Kent Marsh Fontana (Manuscript, 2004).   

      Carlos A. Freeman (1898-1973) was born in Barcelona, State of Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 17 February 1898. He was the youngest of three children.  His father, who was a mining engineer, was a naturalized American of German descent who anglicized his surname from Friedman to Freeman.  His mother was Celsa Moron Freeman from a well-known family in Barcelona, Venezuela.   

      Freeman was sent to high school at Bordentown Military Academy in New Jersey, U.S.A. After graduating from Bordentown, he completed his degree in mining engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.   He remained in the U.S.A. for fourteen years working for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation.  During this period he married and had one son Carlos Freeman, Jr.   He returned to Venezuela with his family and revalidated his degree at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.  He was one of the founders of the School of Geology at the University and of the Venezuelan Society of Geologists.    

      In 1937 he went to work for the Venezuelan Ministry of Mines and Hydrocarbons, and in 1939 was one of four expedition leaders for the Gran Sabana Expedition.  He took the first published photographs of Angel Falls from Jimmie Angel’s airplane on 1 May 1939. 

      In 1942 he became a member of The Explorers Club of New York.  Freeman left the Ministry of Mines on 2 August 1944 to work in Venezuela for Harry Winston Inc., of New York, a jeweler and buyer and seller of diamonds.  The Venezuelan Government granted Freeman concessions in the Gran Sabana to seek diamond and gold mines of his own.  This was an unsuccessful economic venture.   

      Freeman divorced and in 1944 married Ruth Maurine Aubrey Marsh, a United States citizen and mother of Elizabeth Graham Marsh Christian and Diana Kent Marsh Fontana. 

      During WWII, he assisted the U.S. Government by spying on Germans on the Island of Margarita.  Later he had to give up his U.S. passport because his father had never registered him at the U.S. Embassy.  Freeman remained a consultant with the Venezuelan Ministry of Mines and Hydrocarbons until his death from a heart attack in Caracas on 18 October 1973.   
 

For additional history, references and bibliography, please see Research Papers