(1932-2021)

The Laier family farm in Lima Township, Michigan, near the city of Chelsea, was the birthplace of Helen Zita Laier, the first daughter and third-oldest child of Gustave and Rose (Merkel) Laier.

Helen was born on August 10, 1932, joining her brothers Carl and Edward. She was followed by five more siblings: Thomas, Lawrence (who died in infancy), Robert, Teresa, and Donald.

Gustave was a native of Boden, Germany, while Rose was born in Sylvan Township, Michigan, which adjoins Lima Township. The couple bought their farm in 1927, and as a child Helen explored every inch of the property with its two large barns.

She and her brothers attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile down the road, where she was the only child in her class. “In the eight years I attended that school there were never more than twelve students,” she wrote in her autobiography, adding that she was never “academically inclined” and enjoyed recess more than any school subject. “This, I think, was due to the fact that at home we didn’t play – we had to help with the work,” she wrote.

Read more about Sister Helen (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

 

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(1923-2021)

Of all the women who entered the Adrian Dominicans after having experience in the working world, at least one, Margaret Ann Swallow, can lay claim to being a real-life “Rosie the Riveter.”

Margaret Ann was born on September 30, 1923, in Alpena, Michigan, to Arthur and Mary (Mulavey) Swallow. She was the couple’s only child – a second child, a boy, died very early – although she said in an interview for her life story that she never considered herself an “only child” because many of her father’s brothers and sisters lived with her family off and on over the years once the Swallows moved to Detroit.

Arthur worked for the power company in Alpena and then was a line supervisor for Detroit Edison. The family came to Detroit when Margaret Ann was two years old, living first in St. Francis Parish and then in Gesu Parish, where she attended elementary school. She got to know two separate groups of women religious in those years: the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters who taught at Gesu and the cloistered nuns at Mary Reparatrix Convent, across the street from the school.

The Gesu schoolgirls visited the cloistered nuns, some of whom came from abroad, every Wednesday for needlework and sewing, and “on one occasion we were asked to accompany two French nuns to the dime store,” Sister Margaret Ann said. “That was an adventure for us, since the sisters could not speak English well.”

Read more about Sister Margaret Ann (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221.

 

 

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(1926-2021)

In 1926, only around 830 people lived in the small town of Shepherd, Michigan, located in Isabella County about an hour north of Lansing. Among those residents were the Wischmeyer family, to which Alfreda Mary Irene, the future Sister Mary Irene, was born on August 24 of that year.

Edward and Irene (Siefker) Wischmeyer had five surviving children: Mary Irene, who was the second oldest, and four boys, Maurice, Melvin, Norman, and Amos, who would go on to become a priest. Another daughter was stillborn.

When Mary Irene was three years old the family moved to Lansing, where Edward became a foreman at the Motor Wheel Corporation. Her file does not record when he actually got this job, but a short biography written in 1989 mentions that during the Depression years her parents refused welfare benefits, choosing instead to work in the fields alongside migrant workers.

But whatever her family’s circumstances, Mary Irene had a happy childhood. “Our family was almost a community in itself, a close, loving community,” she said in a 1995 interview that served as her autobiography. A self-described tomboy, she loved sports, playing tennis and softball and enjoying ice-skating as well. Her competitive streak also showed up in the times she and one of her brothers carried buckets of cucumbers through the neighborhood, vying to see who could sell the most.

Read more about Sister Mary Irene (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

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(1934-2021)

When she was young and pondering religious life, Mary Irene Moser, the future Sister Charlotte Francis, told her mother she wanted to be a Sister-nurse. The only obstacle was that she didn’t actually know how to go about that, because she was unaware what community she could enter that would give her that opportunity. Who she did know, on the other hand, were the Adrian Dominican Sisters who taught her at Our Lady of Good Counsel School in Chicago.

Ultimately, she said in her 2017 “A Sister’s Story” video, “God fulfilled, because I was a teacher and I worked at the hospital.”

Mary Irene was born on March 24, 1934, in Chicago to Francis and Charlotte (Mazur) Moser, in the southwest section of the city close enough to a variety of industrial operations that the smells of everything from Wrigley’s gum to Nabisco cookies to the Swift meatpacking plant wafted past. She was the oldest of six, followed by John, Frank, Jerome, Walter, and Sandra, who was born after she entered the Congregation.

After grade school at Our Lady of Good Counsel, she attended St. Joseph High School, where she was taught by the Felician Sisters, for a year. Her long experience with the Adrian Dominican Sisters inspired her, and she enrolled in the Congregation’s “prep” program in the summer of 1949. She became a postulant that September and was received as a novice and given her religious name, Sister Charlotte Francis in honor of her parents, in August 1950.

Read more about Sister Charlotte (pdf)

Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, Michigan, 49221. 

 

 

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