Scattered throughout the Evangelism & Missions Archives are paper fragments that tell the story of a remarkable woman – Virginia Healey Asher.

Virginia Healey was born to Irish parents in Chicago in 1869. Although her family was Catholic, she attended the church that had grown out of Dwight L. Moody’s Sunday School class and there gave her life to Christ during an evangelistic meeting when she was eleven. Her future husband, William Asher, was saved at the same meeting. When a few years later D. L. Moody called for workers, she volunteered. He assigned her to outdoor street meetings in Chicago where she sang and witnessed. She planned to go to Moody’s school in Northfield, Massachusetts when William, who had also volunteered for evangelism ministry, proposed. She was a teenage bride when they married on December 14, 1887.