Luella Grannis was born in Michigan in 1850. Grannis later came to Milwaukee, working
as a nurse or nanny to many of Milwaukee’s prominent families. She was also a nurse,
and later the matron, for the Milwaukee Infants’ Home and Hospital (sometimes
referred to as the Babies’ Home) in the 1880s and 1890s. Here Grannis supervised the
day-to-day care and operations of the home for Milwaukee’s orphaned children. She
later married Bradley Barnes and moved to Waupaca, Wisconsin, where she died in
1917.
