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This webinar presents new biographical research on Ella May Bailey (1864-1953), the California schoolteacher whom Shoghi Effendi elevated to the rank of martyrs after her pioneering death in Tripoli. Drawing on previously unexamined primary sources, including family stories, census records, school records, yearbooks, newspaper articles, archival collections in Berkeley, UC-Berkeley, old books, family memoirs, San Jose State University, mining archives, correspondence from the National Bahá’í Archives, and a deep dive into every aspect of her family and their lives, the places she lived and their context.
This research reveals a life far richer than previously documented. The investigation uncovered Ella’s frontier origins: she traveled by covered wagon from Texas to California as an infant, grew up in gold mining camps like Julian and Banner, and overcame childhood polio to become a teacher for thirty-eight years. Her brother Lewis Newton Bailey Jr., a UC Berkeley-trained mining engineer, died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, prompting a remarkable consolation tablet from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. We illuminate her 1912 meeting with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, where He repeated her name over and over, conveying what she understood as a prophecy of suffering.
The research traces her service as the first chairman of the Berkeley Spiritual Assembly and her secret sacrifices, including donating two thousand dollars to the Wilmette Temple while subsisting on tea and toast. Most significantly, this research contextualizes her final pioneering journey to Libya at age eighty-eight. She had told friends that burial in a “potter’s field” didn’t matter to her, and when the Guardian approved her travel, she departed knowing the journey might kill her. Thirty-seven days after arriving in Tripoli, she died surrounded by Bahá’ís reading prayers in Arabic and English. Shoghi Effendi placed a gold star on his map marking her passing and ranked her among the distinguished band of Martha Root, May Maxwell, and Dorothy Baker.
Vafa Bayat is a researcher at a medical software company focused on healthcare AI and precision medicine. He completed his MD/PhD at Baylor College of Medicine, with subsequent residency and postdoctoral training at Stanford. Vafa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two young children. In his free time over the past few years, he has been researching local Bahá’í history, with a focus on writing books on Ella Bailey, Ella Cooper/Helen Goodall, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 visit to Stanford University.
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