The Consulting Business: Working Into Her Eighties
After completing her studies at Scotland Yard, Blount returned to New Jersey and established her own forensic science consulting business.
She ran it for twenty years. She operated it until she was eighty-three.
The business involved consulting with law enforcement agencies and law firms on document examination — the same skills she had developed through years of work with police departments and through her training at Scotland Yard. She examined documents submitted as evidence in legal proceedings. She assessed the authenticity of historical papers. She analyzed handwriting in cases involving forgery, fraud, and document manipulation.
Her clients included police departments in multiple states, law firms handling cases where document authentication was at issue, and historical projects working with pre-Civil War and Civil War-era documents.
One of the specific applications she found for her expertise was in examining slave papers — the documents produced under slavery that recorded the buying, selling, and legal status of enslaved people. These papers, now held in archives, museums, and private collections, are important historical records but also targets of forgery and misrepresentation. Blount’s expertise in document examination made her a resource for those working with this specific category of historical material.
She kept working, kept thinking, kept inventing on a smaller scale. Her grandson Aaron recalls that she put together an automatic eye dropper using plastic, paper clips, and rubber bands — a small practical invention of the same basic character as the feeding device that had occupied her in her thirties.
“Her mind was always churning to conceive new contraptions,” he says.
The consulting business ended when she was eighty-three — not because her mind stopped working, but because at some point practical retirement was necessary. She died at ninety-five, on December 30, 2009, in Newfield, New Jersey.
She had lived long enough to see some recognition of what she had accomplished, though the full scope of her contribution remained underappreciated.