From the day she opened her eyes for the first time she perceived her surroundings differently from most of us and it is almost as her parents knew that when they named her. The word "Petra" simply means "stone" in Greek.Petra began building her mineral collection when she and Nenni (her husband) bought their house in 1946. The reason was that for the first time she could keep all the stones she found in one place.For the first two decades of her collecting work, Petra almost solely looked for stones in the north slopes of the mountains in Stöðvarfjörður.She simply walked out of her front door and up to the mountains above her home. Later she limited her collecting work to East Iceland and her collection is therefore first and foremost an example of the types of minerals that is to be found in that part of the country.