Elizabeth Ann Seton

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born into the Bayley family in 1774 in New York. Her mother died when she was three years old and her father remarried. When Seton was 19, she married William Magee Seton. William Seton suffered from tuberculosis for most of his life and died of it in December 1803. After she was widowed, Seton became interested in and converted to Catholicism. Seton had moved to London with her husband toward the end of his life, and upon returning to New York, she began an academy for young ladies. The parents of many of her students, however, withdrew their children after learning of Seton's conversion to Catholicism. Seton was preparing to shut down the academy when she met Abee Louis William Valentin Dubourg, S.S., a visiting priest who had fled to America from France's Reign of Terror. Seton accepted his invitation to move to Maryland and established St. Joseph's Academy and Free School. Shortly after, Seton established the Sisters of Charity, the first congregation of religious sisters to be established in America.

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