“Elizabeth Ann Bayley, one of two daughters of a prominent Episcopal family, was born in New York on August 28, 1774. She was a charming little girl, small-boned and dainty, with great brown eyes and a face like a cameo, who from the very first loved God and wanted to be good.”Having lost her mother at the age of three, she was deeply attached to her physician father and used to sit beside her schoolroom window watching for him on the street. When he appeared, she would slip out quickly and run for a kiss. As a young girl, she experienced the ups and downs of adolescence, imagined now and then that her father did not love her (there was a stepmother), and on one melancholy occasion she fantasized ending it all. She rejoiced in the world on one day and on the next longed to retreat to a convent in the country to teach children about God, or to join the Quakers “who wear such pretty bonnets.”
For more visit site of the National Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton at http://www.famvin.org/enarchive/admin.php?op=autoEdit&anid=1007
For more information about significant dates in the life of the Vincentian family with the Planning Calendar link on the left of every famvin page.
