Posted By:	Eugene Stackhouse
	Email:
	Subject:	Mother Drexel (Keyser Family)
	Post Date:	February 19, 2006 at 19:19:18
	Message URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/keyser/messages/849.html
	Forum:	Keyser Family Genealogy Forum
	Forum URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/keyser/

The Beatification of a Keyser Descendant        Mother M. Katharine Drexel, the founder of the Catholic Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament will be beatified in Rome on 20 November 1988. This is one step short of sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. She will be known as Blessed Katharine Drexel. Katharine Mary Drexel, the daughter of Francis Anthony and Hannah Jane (Langstroth) Drexel, was born 26 November 1858. She was the great, great, great, great, great grand-daughter of DIRCK KEYSER. Her lineage comes through Peter Dirck Keyser/ Dirck Keyser & Alice Nice/ Peter Keyser & Hannah Levering/ Elizabeth Keyser & Benjamin Lehman/ Eliza Lehman & Piscator Langstroth/ to Hannah Jane Langstroth who married Francis A. Drexel in 1854. Her mother died a little more than a month after her birth. Hannah Jane Langstroth Drexel was buried in the churchyard of the German Baptist Church in Germantown. In April 1860, Francis A. Drexel married as his second wife, Emma Bouvier, at St. Joseph's Catholic Church. With her older sister, and later a step-sister, Katharine was raised in a devout Catholic household. As a young woman she traveled abroad enjoying all the luxuries provided by her wealthy father. In 1884 on a trip to the American Northwest Katharine visited some of the Indian missions established by the Catholic Church.       In 1887 the three Drexel sisters visited the West, and their generosity led to the establishment of many "Drexel Indian schools". They had by this time become the heirs of their father's vast fortune. In 1889 Katharine entered the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh. Archbishop Bevilacqua has said, "Mother Katharine established the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament [1891] to give service to ... the blacks and Indians of this nation. The work she has done is now recognized in a special way by the church itself through this beatification". Mother Katharine died 3 May 1955, at age 96.