Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton SC (August 28, 1774 – January 4, 1821) was an American Catholic educator, known as a founder of the country's parochial school system. Born in New York and reared as an Episcopalian, she married and had five children with her husband William Seton. She converted to Catholicism in 1805 and established the first Catholic girls' school in the nation in Emmitsburg, Maryland. There she also founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity. On September 14, 1975, Seton was the first person born in what would become the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born on August 28, 1774, the second child of a socially prominent couple, surgeon Richard Bayley and his wife Catherine Charlton of New York City. The Bayley and Charlton families were among the earliest European settlers in the New York area. Her father's parents were of French Huguenot and English descent and lived in New Rochelle, New York. Numerous Huguenots had emigrated to North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries at a time of religious persecution in France. As Chief Health Officer for the Port of New York, her father attended to immigrants disembarking from ships at Staten Island. He also cared for New Yorkers when yellow fever swept through the city (in one outbreak, it killed 700 persons in four months). Bayley later served as the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College. Elizabeth's mother Catherine was the daughter of a Church of England priest who was rector for 30 years of St. Andrew's Church on Staten Island. Elizabeth was raised in what would eventually become, in the years after the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church. Her mother, Catherine, died in 1777 when Elizabeth was three years old, possibly due to complications from the birth of her namesake daughter Catherine. The infant died early the following year.