4 January: St Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton

Today is the feast day of St Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, the first person born in the USA to be canonised. Here are ten things you might not know about her.

1. She was born in New York City on 28 August 1774.
2. Her father was a surgeon who cared for the immigrants entering the US. Her maternal grandfather was a Church of England priest. Her mother died when Elizabeth was three, and her father married again. Her step-mother, Charlotte, took Elizabeth with her on her rounds of visiting the poor, so it seems they got on well, but when the marriage ended in divorce, Charlotte didn't want to know Elizabeth and her sister any more. We know from Elizabeth's diary that she grieved the loss of her second mother.
3. Unlike most saints, Elizabeth married, and had children - five of them. Her husband, William, was a rich businessman and they lived in a fashionable house in Wall Street. When her father in law died, they also took in William's six younger sibings, bringing the number of children in the house to eleven. The family belonged to the Episcopal Church.
4. After a period when the French were attacking American ships, William was forced into bankruptcy and the stress caused the tuberculosis he'd suffered from for most of their marriage to flare up. He was sent to Italy by his doctors, who thought the warmer climate would do him good. Elizabeth went with him. William had business partners in Italy who took Elizabeth in after William died. It was while she was staying with them that she was introduced to the Catholic Church, and on her return to New York in 1805, she became a member of the Catholic Church.
5. Around the same time, she started a school for young ladies, which was something widows of Elizabeth's social class often did back then. However, laws against being Catholic had only recently been lifted in New York and some parents still didn't want their daughters to be taught by a Catholic woman and withdrew them from her school. Elizabeth considered moving to Canada, but when she met a priest from Maryland, who was president of a Catholic school there, she decided to move there instead, and a year later had established a school for Catholic girls.
6. She founded the first community for religious sisters in the US in 1810, the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph's. The order was dedicated to caring for poor children, and lived by the rule of St Vincent de Paul. Elizabeth was now generally known as "Mother Seton."
7. The sisters had wanted to actually be part of St Vincent de Paul's order, but as the Napoleonic wars were going on at the time, and there was an embargo of France, they couldn't do that. However, in 1850, decades after Elizabeth died, the two orders merged, as she'd originally wanted.
8. She died on 4 January 1821. She was just 46 years old.
9. She was beatified in 1963 and canonised in 1975.
10. She is the patron saint of widows, seafarers and Catholic schools. She's also the patron saint of the state of Maryland and Shreveport in Louisiana.

Golden Thread

Terry Kennedy is inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the small town of Fiveswood as a place to live and work after university. He is sure he has never visited the town before, but when he arrives there, it seems oddly familiar.

Fiveswood has a rich and intriguing history. Local legends speak of giants, angels, wolves, a local Robin Hood, but most of all, a knight in golden armour. Fiveswood's history also has a dark side - mysterious deaths blamed on the plague, a ghostly black panther, and a landslide which buried the smugglers' caves.

Terry buys an apartment in The Heights, a house which has been empty for decades, since the previous owner disappeared. Now he has finally been declared dead, developers have moved in and turned it into six flats. Terry has the odd feeling he has lived in this enigmatic house before. But that is not all. Since childhood, Terry has had recurring, disturbing dreams which have been increasing in frequency so that now, he has them almost every night. To his dismay, the people from his nightmares are his new neighbours.

Except, that is, for Eleanor Millbrook. She is refreshingly unfamiliar. After Terry saves her from a mysterious attacker, they become close. However, Terry's nightmares encroach more and more on his waking life, until they lead him to a devastating discovery about who he really is.

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Goodreads Review for Golden Thread:

This is a standalone book rather than one of the "super" series. Excellent characterization, a "keeps you guessing" plot, and some fairly deep philosophical issues ! Would recommend this to anyone, but especially recommended if you would like to see a completely new "take" on the people with powers / alternate futures / general oddness type story lines. Somebody make the film !