He was baptized Dwight Lyman Moody, but at about age 12 he adopted a second middle name, Ryther, in honor of his village schoolmaster, Gideon Ryther. He dropped the Ryther at an early age. ®304 He was a 19th Century Evangelist, YMCA worker, Church Leader and Founder of the Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield, Massachusetts. His birthplace in 1837 was a home built about 1823 and bought from his father’s cousin in 1828. It is the house in which his mother, Betsey Holton Moody, lived from shortly after her marriage to Edwin Moody in 1828 until her death in 1896. The house is now the Moody Museum and the Faculty Guest House on the Northfield campus of the Northfield Mount Hermon School. He was one of 9 children. His father Edwin died in 1841 when Dwight was 4 years old and his mother pregnant with twins. Betsey held the family of 9 children together on this farm in Northfield despite severe hardships in their struggle for existence. He was baptized a Unitarian at the Northfield Congregational Church. His formal education ended about the fifth grade. In 1854, at age 17, he tired of life on the farm and went to Boston to find work. He lived for 2 years at 75 Court Street (near Boston Commons) and failing to find a desirable position was reluctantly hired as a sales clerk at a shoe store owned by his uncles Lemuel and Samuel Socrates Holton. His employment was conditioned upon staying out of mischief and joining the Mt. Vernon Congregational Church (645 Boylston) where he was led to Christ by his Sunday School teacher, Edward Kimball on 21 April 1855. He was very active in the Boston YMCA (316 Huntington Avenue). The YMCA was founded in England, with the first YMCA in America established in 1851 in Boston’s Old South Church, 3 years before Dwight moved to Boston. On September 18, 1856 he moved to Chicago, accompanied by his cousin Fred Moody, son of Fanny (Holton) and Simeon Pomeroy Moody, where he continued as a shoe salesman, making $5000 in the last eight months. He began a Sunday School for children in 1858 in Chicago, and in 1860 he gave up the shoe business for full time Christian work and made $300 the first year. On 28 August 1862 he married Emma Charlotte Revell, sister of the publisher Fleming Revell. During the Civil War he did evangelistic and humanitarian work with the soldiers. On 28 February 1864 the Illinois Street Independent Church of Chicago opened with D. L. Moody as pastor. Their daughter Emma was born on 24 October 1864. He became President of the Chicago YMCA in 1866. Their son William Revell Moody was born on 25 Mar 1869 (he later became President of the Northfield Schools his father was to found). In 1870 he was 33 with a personal property value of $2000. He lived in the 20th Ward of Chicago with his wife Emma, 27, children Emma, 5, and William, 1, publisher Fleming Revell, 21, teacher G. M. Nyman?, 35, and his wife Anna, 27, and two domestic servants, Martha Erickson, 28 and from Norway and Charlotte Anderson, 25 and from Sweden. ®300 He met Ira D. Sankey in 1870. He was living in Chicago at the time of the famous 8-9 October 1871 Chicago fire, which destroyed their home, as well as the Illinois Street Independent Church. The first religious structure built after the fire was the Northside Tabernacle, which was dedicated on 24 December 1871, and then from 1873-1876 the Chicago Avenue Church was built. Later the Chicago Avenue Church moved to North Avenue and became the Moody Memorial Church, a separate organization from the Moody Bible Institute. After the Chicago fire, he moved back to East Northfield, Massachusetts for the rest of his life. From 1875 until his death in 1899 he lived at The Homestead (circa 1829) on the Northfield Campus, which is now the Admissions Office. He was not a polished writer, but had a simple, amazingly powerful gospel presentation, and was called the "greatest evangelist of the century, perhaps the greatest since John Wesley” by The Chicago Tribune in 1957. In 1873-1875 he began his evangelism with the first of seven trips to England where he visited 80 cities with singer Ira Sankey. In 1875-6 he and Sankey launched crusades throughout the cities of the eastern United States. It is said he traveled more than one million miles, addressed more than 100 million persons, and personally dealt with nearly 750,000 individuals during these years. Their son Paul Dwight Moody was born on 11 April 1879. In 1879 he founded the Northfield Seminary (later renamed the Northfield School for Girls) on the land which surrounded the old Moody homestead. In 1880 he started the Northfield Summer Conferences. In 1881 he founded the Mount Hermon School for Boys on the west bank of the Connecticut River across from Northfield. In 1887 he founded the Chicago Evangelization Society. In 1894 he founded the predecessor of the Moody Press. The Bible Training Institute building was nearly completed in October 1899. After his death in December 1899 it was renamed in his honor as the Moody Bible Institute (820 N. La Salle Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610). He became ill on 16 November while conducting the Kansas City campaign and died at home in Northfield on 22 December 1899. The funeral services in memory of Dwight L. Moody were held at the Congregational church in East Northfield at 2:30 o’clock Tuesday afternoon with an attendance which recalled the summer days when hundreds went to Northfield to attend the meetings made famous by the presence and influence of the dead evangelist. Men, who for many years have been connected with Mr. Moody’s work, took part. Rev. C. L. Scofield, D. D., officiated, assisted by Rev. R. A. Torrey, of the Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, and appropriate music was sung by the choir of the church, and the Mount Hermon male quartette, which had assisted Mr. Moody in the work he did during the last two years. The body was borne to Round Top, a historic spot upon the grounds of the institute, for burial. The body, which had rested on a leather couch, was placed in a casket of simple design and borne to the church by students from the Northfield Institute.

Dwight L. Moody
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Dwight Lyman Moody (5 February 1837 - 22 December 1899), also known as D. L. Moody, was an American evangelist and publisher who founded the Moody Church, Northfield School and Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts (now the Northfield Mount Hermon School), the Moody Bible Institute and Moody Press.
Moody's work in Chicago, Illinois led to the largest Sunday School of his time. He labored so abundantly that within a year the average attendance at his school was 650, while sixty volunteers from various churches served as teachers. It became so well known that the just-elected President Lincoln visited and spoke at a Sunday School meeting on November 25, 1860. After the Civil War started, he was involved with the U.S. Christian Commission of the YMCA, and ministered at several battlefields. He started a church in Chicago that was burnt down in the Great Chicago Fire. It was rebuilt within three months. His lay follower William Eugene Blackstone was a prominent American Zionist. It was in a trip to England that he became well known as an evangelist, to the point that some have claimed he was the greatest evangelist of the 19th century. His preaching had an impact as great as that of George Whitefield and John Wesley within Britain, Scotland and Ireland. On several occasions he filled stadiums of 2,000 to 4,000 capacity. In the Botanic Gardens Palace, a meeting had between 15,000 to 30,000 people. This turnout continued throughout 1874 and 1875, with crowds of thousands at all of his meetings. When he returned to the United States, crowds of 12,000 to 20,000 were just as common as in England. President Grant and some of his cabinet attended a meeting on 19January 1876. His evangelistic meetings were held from Boston to New York, throughout New England and as far as San Francisco, and other West coast towns from Vancouver to San Diego. He preached his last sermon on 16 November 1899. It has been claimed he was instrumental in converting one million people to the Christian religion, although this is unprovable, due to lack of centralized record keeping.

http://www.moody.edu/ http://www.moodychurch.org/

Dwight Lyman Moody: Evangelist; born at Northfield, Massachusetts, [United States], February 5, 1837; died there December 22, 1899. He was the sixth of the nine children of Edwin and Betsy Moody (née Holton). His father, who was a mason, died in 1841 (aged 41) and the family was in very straitened circumstances for years. His mother died in 1896, aged ninety. Moody received his first religious impressions in the village Unitarian church and his first missionary work was in getting pupils for its Sunday-school, which he attended. His schooling was carried only as far as the district school could take him, and while a young boy he had to earn his living. In 1854 he resolved to try his fortunes in Boston, and there was hired by his uncle, Samuel Holton, as a clerk in his boot and shoe store. One of the conditions of his engagement was that he should regularly attend his uncle's church, the Mount Vernon (Orthodox) Congregational Church, and also its Sunday-school. This promise he faithfully kept and was so much impressed by the truths he heard taught that in 1855 he applied for admission into the church. But his examination was not considered satisfactory and his application was held over for a year when he was thought to have made sufficient attainments in theology for church membership. In September 1856, he went to Chicago and quickly found a more lucrative position than his uncle could offer him, and made a reputation as a salesman and traveler in the shoe trade. He also accumulated $7,000 toward the $100,000 upon which he had set his heart. But while diligent in his business and uncommonly successful he became absorbed more and more in religious work. His energies were first spent upon the Sunday-school as teacher, as gatherer-in of new pupils, and most unpromising ones, who under his instruction improved marvelously, and then as superintendent of the North Market Hall Sunday-school which he built up until it had a membership of 1,500 and out of it in 1863 the Illinois Street Church was formed. He thus was well known in the state as a Sunday-school worker. From the time of his coming to Chicago he had entered heartily into the work of the Young Men's Christian Association, and he raised a huge part of the money for its building, not once but twice, for the first was burned in 1867, and the second in 1871. In 1861 he gave up business and was an independent city missionary, then agent of the Christian Commission in the Civil War and after that again in Sunday-school work and the secretary of the Chicago Young Men's Christian Association. But as yet he had done nothing to give him international fame.

In 1867 he made a visit to Great Britain on account of his wife's health -- he had married in 1862. He made some valuable acquaintances and did a little evangelistic work. One of his converts was John Kenneth Mackenzie. In 1872 he was again in Great Britain, held numerous meetings and won the esteem of prominent Evangelicals. From these he received an invitation to return for general revival work. He came the next year, bringing with him Ira David Sankey, who was henceforth to be linked with him in fame as a revivalist. They landed at Liverpool on June 17, 1873, and held their first services in York. Moody's downright preaching and Sankey's simple but soul stirring singing won attention, and as they passed from city to city they were heard by great crowds. They spent two years in this arduous labor, and then returned to America. Their fame was now in all the churches and invitations poured in upon them to do at home what they had done abroad, so they repeated these services and duplicated their successes, and that in all parts of the country. In 1881 and again in 1891 and 1892 they were in the United Kingdom. One of their most loyal supporters was Henry Drummond, who owed to them the quickening of his religious life in 1874.

In 1892 Moody by invitation of friends made a brief visit to the Holy Land. It was on his return to London that autumn that he first knew of the heart difficulty which ultimately caused his death. It may have been this knowledge that induced him during his remaining years to seek rather to deepen the spiritual life of professing Christians through church services of the ordinary quiet type, than to address the enormous miscellaneous crowds in all kinds of buildings as he did in earlier days. It was while holding services in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 16, 1899, that he broke down, and, although he was able to reach home, he was fatally stricken and soon after died.

Moody had "consecrated common sense." His sermons and shorter addresses abound in personal allusions, in shrewd remarks and home thrusts. He had a hatred of shams and scant respect for persons who had only place to recommend them. He was often abrupt, sometimes brusk. He had no polish, small education, but he knew the English Bible and accepted it literally. He was fond of treating Bible characters very familiarly and enlivening his sermons by imaginary conversations with and between them. But that he was truly bent upon promoting the kingdom of God by the ways he thought most helpful there is no doubt. Like other great revivalists he had much praise which was undesirable, but he never lost his head. He also never allowed excitement to carry his audiences off their feet. For sanity, sincerity, spirituality, and success Moody goes into the very first rank of revival preachers.

During Moody's and Sankey's mission at Newcastle, England, in 1873, the first form of the familiar hymn-book which bears their name appeared in response to the necessity of having a book which was adapted to their needs. This book was originally little better than a small pamphlet, but it was enlarged and has taken on various shapes and had varied contents while preserving its main features. The sale of the book in its different forms has been enormous. Up to 1900, more than a million and a quarter of dollars had been paid its compilers in royalties. Of his share in this money Moody made noble use, and thus opened a chapter in his life which is less known to the public, but will have more permanent interest than his preaching. For with it he founded, or helped to found, the chain of educational institutions which does not bear his name but which is his greatest monument. The first was the Northfield Seminary for Young Women, erected and carried on in his native town. It dates from 1879. This is a school which trains girls for college, if they go so far, but in any case gives them good instruction permeated with religion. All the work of the house is done by the students. In 1881 Mount Hermon School for Young Men was started. The two schools are only a few miles apart. The students are taken at very low rates, combine manual training with the usual school courses, and are under strong religious influences, The Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago [now Moody Bible Institute], open to both sexes, is another of the educational aids which owe their origin to him. The Students' Conferences and the Northfield Christian Workers' Conference, both of which meet annually at Northfield, were inaugurated by him. They have exerted a great influence, and of a very sane and thoughtful type.

Check Northfield records for middle name.