(1935-2021)

The melting pot that was Detroit in the early decades of the 20th Century may have no better examples than Helen Simon and Matthew Mayer. Helen was born in Hattingen, Germany, in 1907, and came with her family to Detroit in the 1920s. Matthew was born in Milltown, New Jersey, in 1908 to Yugoslavian parents who returned to their homeland shortly after his birth, but then emigrated once more to the U.S. after World War I. After living first in Washington State and then in California, the family came to Detroit because there was work there.

Helen and Matthew, a sheet metal worker who eventually owned his own business, met at a dance and married in July 1930. Five years later, on July 17, 1935 – Helen’s birthday – the couple welcomed a daughter, Eleanor Therese. Their son, Matthew, followed two years later.

With the help of friends, the Mayers weathered the Depression, and when Eleanor was four years old the little family was able to move into a home that her father built on Somerset Avenue on Detroit’s east side. Eleanor went to kindergarten at Arthur Elementary School. Since she spoke mostly German at home, school was a tearful experience for several weeks until she got more comfortable with English. But she loved school, and that love for learning continued throughout her early life.

Read more about Sister Helen Therese (pdf)

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

Sister's Prayer Card (PDF)

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(1929-2021)

I would like to be remembered as a joy-filled Dominican committed to my Adrian Congregation, a person who meets and praises God in the beauty and wonder of creation. I would like the world to be a little better for my having lived in it. As Rich Heffern wrote, I would like to be “marinated in life’s goodness” – then I will be prepared to dance to the joy of life into the heavenly Jerusalem.

Sister Jean Irene McAllister concluded a March 2005 update to her autobiography with these sentences summing up her long life as an Adrian Dominican Sister.

The future Sister Jean Irene was born January 24, 1929, in Redford, Michigan, and baptized Audrey Anita. She was the older of two girls born to Daniel and Genevieve (Wagner) McAllister; her sister Catherine (known as Kay) followed on Christmas Eve 1934.

Both Daniel and Genevieve were born into farming families, Daniel in Kawkawlin Township, Michigan, near Bay City, and Genevieve in Colon, Michigan, in the southwestern part of the state. Daniel’s parents both died when he was very young, however, and he was sent to the St. Francis Boys’ Home in Detroit.

Read more about Sister Jean 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)

There’s a beautiful quote from the ancient Greek statesman Pericles that is found on many tombstones which says, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

We are gathered in this sacred space today to honor and recognize our sister Clarice Moyle and her many gifts, gifts which are now woven as beautiful threads into our lives and the lives of her beloved family and dear friends …

These paragraphs began Sister Rosemary Finnegan’s homily for the funeral of Sister Clarice Moyle, a “valiant woman” in the mold of the one described in the famous reading from Proverbs 31, the funeral Mass’s first reading.

Clarice Marie Moyle was born on October 18, 1934, in Jacksonville, Florida, to James and Mary (Ohmer) Moyle. She was the second of the couple’s two children, born nine years after her sister, Grace.

Read more about Sister Clarice (PDF)

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

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(1935-2021)

Frances Louise Guethlein, the future Sister Marian Edward, was born in Detroit on May 7, 1935, to Edward and Mary (Lucey) Guethlein. Edward was a native of Evansville, Indiana, while Mary came to the U.S. from Kilgarvin, Ireland, at the age of seventeen.

The couple had five children, of whom Frances was in the middle. She had three sisters, Barbara, Kathleen (known as Kay) and Joan, and a brother, Ed.

The Guethleins originally lived in St. Bridget Parish in Detroit, and Frances attended first and second grades at St. Bridget School. When she was in third grade, however, the family moved to Livonia, a Detroit suburb, and Edward and Mary enrolled their children at Our Lady of Sorrows School, which was staffed by the Adrian Dominican Sisters, in nearby Farmington as soon as the school had space for them.

Read more about Sister Marian (PDF)

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

 

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