Lyla Mae Olson, where are you?

+4 votes
1.2k views

So, in researching mask designs for the Mask-A-Thon, I came across a design called the Olson Mask, named for "legendary maker nurse Lyla Mae Olson". Now, I'm not going to bother the staff with questions about genealogy while they're busy saving lives, but I was curious, and thought it might be cool to put up a profile for Lyla Mae. Unfortunately, so far, my research has come up empty in terms of her birth and death dates and places, but I did discover that she wrote a book called Improvised Equipment in the Home Care of the Sick, originally published in 1928 and revised in 1933. (Review here.) 

So if you're not busy sewing masks or printing face shields, I wouldn't mind some help in finding out more about her.

WikiTree profile: Lyla Olson
in The Tree House by Greg Slade G2G6 Pilot (664k points)

Dear everyone, 

You are all amazing. We named the masks after Lyla Mae Olson because we realized that she was a pioneer in what we now call the MakerNurse movement. Little was known about her before. We have her books and use them often to teach the 21st century generation of nurses (and doctors) that generating hardware ideas for your ideas saves lives. When we were doing our research into the origins of nurses that make/hack/improvise some 7 years ago, we found hundreds of examples of this type of prototyping. But there one specific nurse that stood out, and that was Lyla Olson---because she was one of the few that were in a position to *legitimize* this type of activity amongst their generation. Sadly, about two decades after her final books was published the profession took a nose dive in the acceptance by nurses to do hands-on creative work. Nevertheless, they kept on doing it. You can read more about it in our paper, A History of Nurse Making and Stealth Innovation 

So when coronavirus hit, one of our partner hospitals came up with a wonderful design for a mask. Collectively we jumped at the chance to give a small nod to a giant in her field, whose legacy of enabling frontline workers to create things with their hands, is something we are seeing everyday during the pandemic. 

We stumbled upon this page because my husband and I were talking about how cool it would be to let her family know how much she's being recognized for with the masks. And we were wondering how to make the connections, and then we found all of you! This is wonderful and thank you for finding such great information on her. 

If anyone else wants more great historical nurses to dig up, please reach out to us at anna@makerhealth.co because we want to honor all of them.

Best

Anna Young

co-founder
MakerHealth, home of of the MakerNurse community

Hi all,

I am an 'Olson' currently in medical school in Minnesota and Lyla Mae was my great, great aunt! She was originally from Glenwood, MN. My grandpa knew her and is also here in Minnesota. Thanks for all your work here! My dad has a lot of information about her and plans to comment here soon.

Dear Anna,

You are all amazing. We named the masks after Lyla Mae Olson because we realized that she was a pioneer in what we now call the MakerNurse movement. Little was known about her before.

Yes. I have noticed this in a number of fields. There are many figures who are widely recognised as founders or major influences in a given field, but when you try to find out more, you find that most of the sources are just repeating the same few bits of information and nobody has done any serious digging. You would not believe how many important people don't even have stub profiles on Wikipedia. So digging up the facts on Lyla Mae was kind of a fun challenge.

We stumbled upon this page because my husband and I were talking about how cool it would be to let her family know how much she's being recognized for with the masks. And we were wondering how to make the connections, and then we found all of you! This is wonderful and thank you for finding such great information on her.

We, too, want to honour her, and, by extension, all of those who are working on the front lines to take care of us. There has been enough medical "history" in my own family that I have long had an appreciation for all those who work so hard, sometimes at great personal risk, to care for others. I am pleased to see that others are also expressing their appreciation, although I would have preferred that it didn't take such extreme circumstances to make that happen.

If anyone else wants more great historical nurses to dig up, please reach out to us at ...  because we want to honor all of them.

As it happens, I've been looking for health care workers to put together into a challenge similar to this one: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/742127/can-you-help-connect-a-delaware-governor

I have found that those challenges work best when they have about one to two dozen profiles to connect. If there are too few, there's less chance that people will find any of the profiles interesting enough to work on. If there are too many, people get intimidated by the size of the task. So if you can send me a list of people to work on, I'll see if I can put a challenge together. To put up a profile on WikiTree, we need these pieces of information:

  • First Name
  • Last Name At Birth (aka "maiden name")
  • Either a birthdate or a date of death (at least to the year) 

Any additional information (birthplace, place of death, schools attended, parents' names, spouse's name, etc.) is great if we can get it. And something about what they wrote or invented can help to spark people's interest in working on that profile.

Greg

P.S. If you can, I would recommend editing your comment, and replacing your email address with the MakerHealth URL. WikiTree's forum is accessible to search engines, which means that your email address can be harvested by spammers, and we wouldn't want your inbox to be inundated with spam.

Thank you, Marin. We're looking forward to hearing from your dad, and anybody else in your family.

Hi there

I am making the Olson mask here in the UK and posting a tutorial for local people. I wanted to honour the memory of your great,great aunt and so having found out the mask's origin I feel it necessary to highlight who she was!

Thank you and stay safe!

Ginn Downes

ginnscreativeworkshops.co.uk
Greg -

Back when I started sewing the Olson Mask in Mar 2020 - I was interested in its origins and started looking for Ms. L.M. Olson. (I'm now over 1,500 masks and part of a group that has hit 70,000+) And discovered - like you said - no Wikipedia page.  I am compiling everyones work and getting that page up.  Any contributions by members to that page would be great!
Or if they prefer not to add to the wikipedia page - adding more info here would be wonderful as well.

Many thanks for all the work here.
Greg -

Thank you for starting this quest.  The work you started was important in helping me start Lyla Olson's wikipedia page - which has been approved and is now up!
Hi all, relative Marin again here. I have been trying to get my parents to get in touch with everyone and they are being so slow haha! I think they have some updates to the wiki page though, who can they contact? I think it is just so cool to see her story up. Thank you to everyone!

Link to article my folks found:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lxvxDWD1QjUuP_iUIzO7AyajgccqMW-d/view?usp=sharing

Thank you for creating the Wikipedia entry, M.F. That makes Lyla Mae notable, so I added the sticker to her profile.

Marin, Lyla Mae's profile is open, so any WikiTreer can add information, sources, photos, or whatever. That means you can edit it yourself, or any of your family can edit it if they join WikiTree.

3 Answers

+4 votes

I think this is her. Find - A - Grave

by Nancy Thomas G2G6 Pilot (197k points)

In 1930 Census

Death Certificate

At Family Search with Sources

Love the photo........

Peggy

Certainly living in the same city as the Mayo Clinic is suggestive. And that birth year meshes with a birth year that I found on a library site. But do any of the FamilySearch sources (which I don't have access to because I refuse to give them my birthdate and I refuse to lie) confirm that this Lyla Mae Olson is not just a nurse, but also an author?

I've been thinking that what we really need to find is either an obituary, or else some kind of "about the author" blurb in one of her books that tells us enough to confirm the match.

A note on an Ancestry tree:

 Don't know what their relationship was but Lyla Mae Olson and Mildred Seybert travelled to Cuba together when they were in their 20's, and in the 1940 Census were living together working as Nurses in Rochester,MN. They're buried next to each other in Rochester. They also published a book together called Taffy and Tuffy about their King Charles Spaniels. It has a forward written by Helen Keller.

She was the Director of Nursing at the Mayo Clinic - so dollars to donuts, she is the author. You don't become Director of Nursing at some place like Mayo without some notable accomplishments. If all the hospitals weren't so busy, I'd shot off an email to Mayo. I'll dig some more.
Greg - I have reached out to the contributor that placed her photo on Find A Grave.
+2 votes

sort of related; here is a profile of a nurse that I did this month after reading an article about her. could not see a path to connect her to global tree.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Wald-263

by S Stevenson G2G6 Pilot (243k points)
+3 votes

I heard back from the photo contributor at Find-A-Grave:

"yes indeed she wrote those books. Head of nursing at Mayo. Good friend of Helen Keller. She never married, had no children. She was the second of 9 children born to Norwegian immigrants."

by Nancy Thomas G2G6 Pilot (197k points)

Thank you for contacting the photo contributor, Nancy. Now that we know that this Lyla Mae Olson is the Lyla Mae Olson, I'll start the profile. Would you mind asking if we can use Lyla's photo? (Or did you already do that?)

sorry I didn't see this. My notification went to my junk folder. I will ask and let you know.
Nancy -

Would you mind sharing the sources for the friendship with Helen Keller.  I have the bare bones stuff.  Also if you have any more details on her work at the Mayo Clinic, I would appreciate that.  I have her pinned down as superintendent of nurses at Worrall Hospital as early as1925.
I'm having trouble tracking down the Haler Hospital reference by Anna Young.
I'm putting up a Wikipedia page for her - and want to make it as interesting and detailed as I can.  
Many Thanks.
The person who contributed her photo to Find A Grave is the one who wrote what I posted here 30 March. Contact them here: https://www.findagrave.com/user/profile/46964024

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