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.