We are happy to announce the launch of one of our America 250 Projects, celebrating the many, many legacies of the United States in the years surrounding the 250th anniversary of America’s independence in 2026.
Mother Seton, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, adopted and modified the Vincentian rule for the United States. Her community laid the foundation for six separate communities of apostolic religious women to commence world-changing service to those in need, among them being the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, with whom the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s joined in 1850. Her virtuous life and her groundbreaking work led to her becoming the first native-born canonized American citizen in 1975.
The legacy of charity and groundbreaking work in education continues through the Sisters of Charity Federation.
Along with our partners at DePaul University, we have begun to digitize the entirety of Mother Seton and her entire family’s writings, so that they may be searchable and usable to researchers, discerners, and the general public in the most timely way possible. For the writings in the English language, full transcription is provided. (If you would like to volunteer to help provide translation for French, Italian, and Latin writings, please reach out via email at archives@doc.org).
This will not be an easy project. The materials from Box 1 of the collection are now available – for the record, there are 34 more boxes. While the work will extend past the Semiquincentennial year of 2026, accessibility of these materials will as well, and we hope this can be a lasting impact of the Seton Legacy.
The National Archives and Records Administration is the repository of all official documents of the United States government. With Mother Seton and her family’s long history in the United States, particularly in the United States Navy, the Seton family appears in many different places in our nation’s official government repository.
First, it is also worth noting that the ancestral Seton family have their own collection in the National Records of Scotland from Glorious Revolution through 1785.
The most obvious place that the family is represented is in the census records, with Elizabeth Ann and William Magee Seton appearing in the earliest censuses in New York City, and then Mother Seton appearing in Emmitsburg in 1810 and 1820. The census records provide massive volumes of information related to demographics and are used most immediately for congressional apportionment and for funding for public services.
Listing for Mother Seton and the community in the 1810 census under “E. Seton”
William Seton III, one of Mother Seton’s surviving sons, is among the most represented due to his career in the Navy. Military records, for both genealogists and veterans, are among the most used and requested materials in the National Archives. Within the collection “Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library,” there is a series called “Letters Received from Commissioned Officers Below the Rank of Commander and from Warrant.” This series contains various letters documenting official correspondence of enlisted sailors and their interaction with superior officers. Among these are 19 letters including requests for leave, administrative documents, and reports from William Seton reporting to his commanding officers. They span from his time on the Macedonian during its tour of the Pacific (and whose log is in the possession of the Daughters’ Archive). Many others request shore leave or ask for extensions of leave.
William’s sister Catherine makes an appearance in one of his requests. On October 9, 1828, William requested leave to travel in Europe due do “the continued ill health of my sister, to whom the Phisicians [sic] have recommended that course, as the only hope of renovating her constitution.” This occurred during Catherine’s “World Traveler” era, when she was making extended stays in Europe, before eventually becoming a religious Sister of Mercy. His letters stretch through his return to Norfolk in 1833 and return to civilian life.
William Seton to the Secretary of the Navy, October 9, 1828: “Sir[,] I had the honor a few days past, to apply to you for permission to travel in Europe. I beg leave to state that my reason for doing so was the continued ill health of my sister, to whom the Phisicians [sic] have recommended that course, as the only hope of renovating her constitution”
William Seton Maitland, nephew of Elizabeth and William Magee, also appears in the military records during the Seminole Wars in Florida.
In the more modern day, and as a preview of things to come, the National Archives is also in possession of the official proclamations from the U.S. government about Mother Seton’s canonization. Under Press Secretary William Baroody’s files, held at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, is the official proclamation of Elizabeth Ann Seton Day, alongside a signed thank you letter from Sister Mary John Lindner for the community’s replica copy, signed by President Ford. This replica will be on display next year (2025) for our exhibit “One of Us” at the Seton Shrine, celebrating the 50th anniversary of this event!
As a reminder of the vast scale of the National Archives, and the complexity of archival research, these records are among those that are digitized and available remotely to researchers. This totals a mere 2% of the National Archives’ holdings, and there may well be other materials that one day are accessible without a trip to your nearest NARA branch. William Seton IV, Mother Seton’s grandson, appears in Civil War veterans records, but his company, the New York 16th Artillery, have not been digitized yet.
As an example of records which need to be visited in-person, these scans were lent to us by our friend and colleague Dr. Catherine O’Donnell and come from the National Archives branch in Kansas City, where Record Group 21 “Records of District Courts of the United States” reside. Less than 0.5% of these records are scanned and online as of this time, but among them are early records of the United States bankruptcy court. It is in these documents that the Setons’ life in New York City began to unravel, as the Seton-Maitland shipping company ran out of money, and the Setons were forced to sell their assets.
Front cover of 1800 bankruptcy filing
First page of Seton Family’s assets during bankruptcy case
Archivists at NARA are working hard to make more materials available, both in-person and remotely. A way that you can help is to make more materials more searchable. Their Citizen Archivist program allows anyone with an Internet connection to apply metadata and transcription to documents that have been scanned and made available. These tags help make more materials searchable, so that that needle in haystack – that one stray name in a vast file – can turn up with a few strokes of a keyboard.
The records in the National Archives are the property of the American people. Make use of your records, and help others make use of them too!
One of the communities of priests that influenced the development of the Catholic Church in the colonial United States was the Order of St. Augustine, or Augustinians. Working and living in the same time period and parts of the country as Mother Seton, it was natural that their paths should cross. Although the Daughters archive does not explicitly talk about Augustinian business, figures and events from their early history in the United States are peppered throughout the records within the collection.
The Augustinians were founded in the 1200s in Italy with a charism based upon the rule of St. Augustine of Hippo. The order arrived in the United States in 1796 with the Irish Fathers John Carr and Matthew Rosseter. Matthew Hurley, also an Irishman by birth, was the first to join the American community, and after the deaths of Rosseter and Carr in 1812 and 1820, he was the only Augustinian in the country.
Father Matthew Hurley, O.S.A., as painted by Thomas Sully in 1813
Elizabeth met Father Hurley in 1805 during her years in New York City, after she had converted to Catholicism but before she founded her community, when Hurley was at St. Peter’s Church. Although there are only three surviving drafts of letters from Mother Seton to Hurley and two from Hurley to Mother Seton, mentions of him in her correspondence are numerous, as Hurley very much fulfilled the role of spiritual advisor early in her time as a Catholic. It was Hurley who gave Elizabeth the confirmation name Mary and performed the honor of receiving her sister-in-law Cecilia and daughter Anna Maria into the Church.
Seton to Hurley, draft, n.d.
Hurley to Mother Seton, 1806, after the conversion of Cecilia Seton
In 1807, Father Hurley was recalled in ill health to Philadelphia by Father Carr, where he went on to become pastor at St. Augustine Church. There, he formed part of a Catholic circle that remained in contact with Mother Seton, including Mathew Carey, who published the first American English-language Catholic Bible; Matthias O’Conway, a translator and early donor to the community; his daughter Cecilia, who was the first to join Mother Seton’s community; and Rachel Montgomery. Montgomery formed the lay board of St. Joseph’s orphan asylum, who, along with Hurley, urged Mother Seton to send Sisters for the first time out from their spiritual home in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Sister Rose White led the band of Sisters to St. Joseph’s in 1814 and would later become Mother Seton’s successor as leader of the community.
Despite his influence, no letters received by Hurley from Mother Seton survive. Indirectly, the community records provide the reason for this in the accounts of Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace and the Philadelphia Know-Nothing riots of 1844. Here, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant mobs sacked churches, burning most of the Augustinian library, including Mother Seton’s letters.
Among the other Augustinian effects on Mother Seton and the community include some of the Augustinian spiritual tradition. Likely at the recommendation of Father Hurley, the Archives is still in possession of Elizabeth’s copy of The Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a spiritual work of Father Thomas of Jesus, member of the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine.
Even with the loss of Mother Seton’s letters to the early Augustinians, tragic as it may be, the materials in the collection document the spiritual growth and development of Mother Seton. Even if she ultimately based her community on the tradition of Saints Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, she built upon the traditions that surrounded her and the inherited tradition of (at that time) 1,800 years of spiritual growth and development. The Augustinians today operate three provinces in the United States, as well as one university, Villanova, in Philadelphia.
docarchivesblog.org 