(1932-2018)

“We met over the dough.”

That was what Sister Andrea Broutin’s parents used to tell her about the way they met. “For a long time I thought we had a lot of money,” she said in her life story. As it turned out, the reference to “dough” was literal – her father met her mother at the Detroit bakery where he worked.

Andre Broutin had come to Detroit from Belgium, while Helena De Munter was born in Gladstone, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. When Helena’s father died of throat cancer at an early age, her mother moved to Detroit with four of their twelve children and went into business for herself as a bar owner.

After Andre and Helena married, they made their home in St. Jude Parish on the east side of Detroit. Two children were born: Andrea, on March 1, 1932, and John, eight years later. Following Belgian custom, Andrea was named for her father. Her two middle names, Rose Marie, were in honor of her two grandmothers.

Andrea came into the family at the height of the Great Depression, and ironically enough considering her interpretation as a child of the word “dough,” her parents struggled to make ends meet. “But I never felt poor,” she said in her life story. “In my house we had a lot of love, a lot of plain, good food, and my mom was a delicious cook. My dad baked bread, cakes and pies, which he also did at work, so we were very fortunate.”

Andrea attended public schools throughout her elementary and secondary education. But her friends went to St. Jude School, and she made a habit of skipping school so she could go to morning Mass with them, after which they would go out for breakfast. “My Catholic friends had a lot of free days, like saints’ days, but I didn’t know all that stuff then,” she said. “I would just go with them to Mass and I loved it.”

(1925-2018)

In writing her life story, Sister Betty Condon began with her great-grandparents, who left behind their Irish roots in Killarney and Cork and braved the difficult Atlantic crossing to begin new lives in America. They settled in Charleston, South Carolina, and it was there that, two generations later, Martha Igoe and Matthew Condon met as they each chaperoned the younger members of their respective families at a party.

Martha and Matthew were married in July 1913, and the next year a daughter, Mary Caroline, came into the family. Caroline was followed by James, Martha, Matthew, Elizabeth – who was always called Betty – on November 12, 1925, and Mary Clare.

Caroline died of blood poisoning at the age of thirteen, while away at a boarding school. Betty was just three years old, but despite being so young at the time she always recalled that someone told her to look up at the stars and know Caroline was looking down at her.

Neither Martha nor Matthew had completed high school; Martha, who was the eldest, left high school to help care for her siblings, while Matthew left school at fourteen to work in the department store his parents had started. 

Read more about Sister Betty (pdf)

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

(1926-2018)

When Frances Stibich was a young woman, she traveled to Detroit from her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to visit one of her sisters, who lived on Gratiot Avenue in a flat above the Stein Hardware store. During that visit, she happened to meet the storeowner’s son, Anthony Stein. Love quickly bloomed, and the couple married in 1922.

Four children resulted from that union: Dorothy Antoinette, Ruth Marie, Eugene, and Barbara Ann. Ruth Marie, the future Sister Anne Bernadette Stein, was born on September 1, 1926, in Detroit. 

The family lived in St. Anthony Parish, and Ruth Marie attended the parish school for the first and last parts of her elementary education. As she put it in her life story, “My sister went there to school for all twelve years but my brother and I kind of shopped around for a while.”

That resulted in her spending two years at the Stevens Open Air School in Detroit. “Open Air” schools were established to help combat the spread of tuberculosis by providing facilities that had plenty of fresh air and good ventilation, and an uncle of the Stein children had been exposed to TB. Eugene spent four years there, while Ruth Marie attended for three years, from 1935 to 1938, and then went back to St. Anthony School.

(1927-2018)

Detroit’s large and vibrant Polish community in the first half of the 20th Century formed the backdrop for Sister Mary Saynay’s earliest years.

Sister Mary was born on May 21, 1927, to Joseph and Lucille (Rybczynski) Saynay. Her birth name was officially Marie Sajnaj – reflecting the Polish spelling of the family surname – but when she was ten years old her father changed his name. At that age, too, she began being known as Mary, rather than Marie. For the rest of her life, she was known as Mary Saynay, and in 1973, she took the step of having her name legally changed.

Ten children in all were born to the Saynays. Mary had a twin sister, Charlotte, who died shortly after birth. Additionally, she had seven sisters and two brothers: Margaret, Barbara, Lillian, Bernadine, Constance, Rosalie, Christine, Joseph, and Lawrence. Rosalie and Christine entered the Congregation as well; Christine became Sister Barbara Mary, while Rosalie eventually left the Congregation.

Read more about Sister Mary (pdf)

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

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