About Us

This website is dedicated to the life, philanthropy, philosophy, and legacy of Lydia Moss Bradley. It was created by the students in HIS 352 at Bradley University as a semester-long project to learn more about digital humanities. In this course, we learned about digital archiving, the formation of websites, collecting data, researching historical figures, and inputting information into a cohesive website. We also worked alongside Portraits of Peoria. They hire artists to create murals about famous Peorians who made a difference in the community and placed them downtown for everyone to see and learn about.

All of us want to spread the word about how inspiring Lydia Moss Bradley was during her time, and how her legacy still is to this day. We want to inform others how ahead of her time she was with her philosophies and philanthropies for the 1800s and why she is an important historical figure.

We each worked in different sectors during the semester in the creation of this website. Elijah Furuness was our main artifact collector. He would go to Special Collections and gather up articles, photographs, or anything else newsworthy and scan them for us and the website. Eli was also our communicator for setting up interviews. Sylvia Krech helped with the creation of the website and edited our interviews. She was helpful in anything behind the scenes and made sure everything was working properly. Shannon Joesph was one of our researchers. She helped reach out to different people and resources to possibly use to learn more about Lydia's philanthropy as well as helped transcribe interviews. Morgan Kozar was another researcher about Lydia’s life and the main notetaker for everything we did. She was very helpful with gathering information that could be useful with possible articles, and websites that talked about Lydia Moss Bradley. Taryn Ewert was the main writer for some of the bigger things on the website. She helped with the group’s social media pictures and captions each week to document the process and what we were doing, as well as helping wherever needed. Adam Sarabia was also very helpful behind the scenes. He uploaded a ton of documents and pictures as well as helped transcribe articles and interviews each week. Dionte Henderson was our photographer. Anytime we wanted something to be photographed he would use his skills and camera to beautifully capture artifacts, newspapers, and historic sites as well as anything else we needed.

Thank you to all the following people and organizations that helped us create this website: Dr. Mae Gilliland Wright, Portraits of Peoria, Bradley University Special Collections, Peoria Public Library, Linda Aylward, Doug Leunig, Eileen Leunig, Peoria Historical Society, Connie Andrews, Libby Tronnes, Liz Bloodworth, and Glynis Plym.