As a young girl in Germany, Martha would gather neighborhood children together for Sunday School. That was the beginning of her lifetime career of caring for and loving people, especially those that were often forgotten by...

Clara Strehlow (born 1895) was among the first students at a new deaconess school which opened Watertown, Wisconsin in the 1920s. This new training program did not require deaconess trainees to become nurses. Clara was consecrated on May...

Geraldine Eubanks Plato's first encounter with a deaconess was as a child in St. Louis. She was playing in the park with her 12 siblings on a Sunday morning. Deaconess Ann Koch followed the children home and asked their mother what she...

Pr. Herzberger continued to work towards the goal he had set – the founding of a Deaconess Association in the Lutheran Church. Shortly before the next convention of the Associated Lutheran Charities in July 1919, he published another...

Louise Rathke was a member of the first deaconess training class at Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and graduated in 1925. Louise served about six months at the Apache Indian Mission in Arizona and was then sent to India in 1926 as the first...

Deaconess Martha Eber was consecrated as a deaconess in 1924, following her graduation from the Lutheran Hospital Nurses Training School in Ft. Wayne, IN. She was the first LDA deaconess to serve in a parish. From 1924 to 1940 she...

In 1911, the Associated Lutheran Churches met in convention in Ft. Wayne, IN. At that convention, Pastor F.W. Herzberger presented a paper on the female diaconate. This paper included eight theses and an exposition on the name "deaconess"...

In August 1919, The Fort Wayne Lutheran Hospital in Indiana agreed to admit deaconess students into the training school for nurses. The arrangement was that the deaconess students received the regular courses in theoretical and practical...