Elizabeth Ann Seton

Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in 1774 in New York City, into one of the city's most respected Episcopalian families — her father was a prominent physician, and she grew up surrounded by education, wealth, and social standing that most people of her era never touched. But her early years were also marked by loss: her mother died when Elizabeth was just three, and the stepmother who followed never gave her the warmth she craved.

She found comfort instead in reading scripture and in long walks in nature, developing a reflective, almost melancholic inner life that stood apart from the busy social world her family moved in. By her teenage years she was already known for a deep, personal faith that went beyond the formal religious observance expected of a young woman in her position.

At nineteen, she married William Magee Seton, a wealthy young merchant, and the marriage was a genuinely happy one. Together they had five children, and for a time Elizabeth lived the life expected of a woman of her class — except she kept visiting the poor and sick of New York with a devotion that set her apart from her peers, work she never treated as charity work but as something closer to a calling.