The Oral History Project

The Illinois Training School for Nurses Oral History Project was conducted under the direction of Dr. Olga Maranjian Church, the founder of the Midwest Nursing History Research Center. It was originally funded with a grant from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). This digitization project was funded through a grant from the Illinois State Historical Records Advisory Board (ISHRAB).

For this project, 20 individual graduates of the Illinois Training School for Nurses (1880-1929) were interviewed for the purpose of documenting their individual experiences as students and graduates of their school. The collection of these historical accounts was vital not only for its personal value, but for its potential to enhance the potential of the nursing discipline. Of the 20 original interviews done, 12 remained in the collections of the MNHRC and were digitized to preserve the narratives they contained. An additional transcript exists of an interview for which we do not have audio.

Although organized nursing in the United States has been in existence for well over a century, the legacy of nursing’s roots in our society has seldom been systematically examined, and the passage of time has made this task evermore difficult. As nursing education boomed during the 70s and 80s, Dr. Church felt it was the perfect time to conduct this noble undertaking to not only preserve the roots of nursing education in the Midwest and across the country, but to also fill in the historical gaps around the art of nursing before they were lost to time.

An enormous thank you goes to the Illinois state Historical Records Advisory Board (ISHRAB) for making this project possible.