Genealogy Journey Leads to Endowment

In 2001, when Barbara Fifield Brandt ’71 LAS, EDM ’82, PHD ’87 ED, celebrated the birthday of her father, Norm, she had no idea she would end up with the best gift of all.

Brandt would become the eventual owner of a family memoir that a cousin had brought as a present. Tucked within its 200 pages were a mere few sentences about a distant relative named Almira Fifield.

“I was stunned,” said Brandt, who calls the revelation the “Norm and the Notebook” moment. As a longtime professional in the field of health sciences education, she knew immediately that Fifield had been a “unicorn”—the rarity of being a female physician in the mid-1800s.

More than two decades would pass before Brandt would find the time and energy to trace Fifield’s story. Having served for 17 years as associate vice president for education at the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center and founding director of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, Brandt had never dabbled in genealogical research. Nonetheless, in 2023 she threw herself into uncovering her ancestor’s remarkable story, a gargantuan effort that resulted last year in the establishment of an Indiana state historical marker noting Fifield’s achievements as a medical pioneer and a contributor to the Civil War effort.

Fifield, who spent much of her early life in Porter County, Indiana, graduated in 1859 from the New England Female Medical College (later part of Boston University). With the onset of the Civil War, she offered her professional services to the Union Army, perhaps spurred by the news that her brother had recently been wounded. Told to minimize her medical credentials, Fifield worked as a nurse in a Union hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, where eventually, as her expertise came to light, she headed a surgical ward. She died in 1863 of “congestive chills” and was buried in her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana.

“I’ve tramped around rural cemeteries and dusty museum basements” across the nation to piece together Fifield’s story, Brandt said. Indeed, one of her most remarkable finds was a trove of 64 wartime letters, written by Fifield’s brother, which included news of his sibling; the missives had been stored by a far-flung family member in the garage of his Florida home. Brandt got her first peek at Fifield’s face when distant kin learned of her quest and reported that Fifield’s photo was affixed to the back of her graduation diploma, which was hanging on the office wall of a Fifield descendant (yet another female physician).

“What struck me,” Brandt said of her tireless sleuthing, “was how there was so much important history . . . rotting away” in basements of museums, churches, and the like.

“The need to do historic preservation and archiving is just really critical,” she said. “Our history is disappearing.”

Imagine Brandt’s delight when she learned of the Conservation Lab on the campus of her alma mater, toured its premises, and spoke to its faculty and staff. “What I became extremely interested in is the science of preservation and conservation at the Library,” she said. “I was like—this is it! I’ve always been at a research university, and . . . the intersection of libraries and science is just really what I’m excited about,” she said.

That excitement led to the establishment in 2024 of the Barbara F. and Lawrence M. Brandt Library Endowment, which supports preservation and conservation efforts within the Library.

“I’ve always loved the Library,” said Brandt, a longtime donor who can remember the exact table at which she studied in the Main Library as an undergraduate. “I’m very, very happy [about the endowment] as I’ve been looking for something that was meaningful for me to be donating to.”

“She was . . . very committed,” Brandt said of Fifield’s insistence on using her skills to contribute to the Civil War. That commitment to education and service reflects Brandt’s own efforts to honor her forebear, a commitment to preserving history that also proves core to the Library’s longtime mission.