A guide to the whole Jesus Caritas website.
Click on: Site Map
Search Jesus Caritas using DuckDuckGoJESUS CARITAS SITE MAPA guide to the whole Jesus Caritas website. There are five communities of the Little sisters in USA:
The Little sisters in USA invite you to visit their website: an English-language site about the Little Sisters of Jesus worldwide. . Little Sister Priscilla describes life with the circus and the original intuitions of Little Sister Magdeleine in this talk in People on the Move(N° 99 (Suppl.), December 2005) published by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. Visit also the Little sisters in Paterson USA: Little Sisters of Jesus: A contemplative life without walls. |
A long history:The King Island people, Alaska![]() I was
reassigned to Nome. Alaska in the
mid-seventies. I
was looking for a way
to get reacquainted with our friends from King Island, Alaska. They are Inupiaq people,
traditionally sea
mammal hunters of Walrus, Seals and the occasional whale. I began visiting the
Elders and tracing with
them their family tree. I
did not
realize it at the beginning but knowledge of the family tree is very
important
in all the Eskimo cultures. During
these
visits I noticed that the young members of the family would gather
around us
and try to follow what the Elders and myself were doing. As I worked on different
families I began
developing, on big sheets of paper, the outline of different family
trees. This all
took place during the long nights of
winter! Then
I discovered that the Jesuit fathers
who had begun evangelizing the Inupiaq people at the turn of the 19th
century had taken detailed records of Baptisms, deaths etc. and that
these
records were all stored at Gonzaga University in the state of
Washington. I wrote
to the Jesuit library for permission
to copy the records of Fr. Bellermine Lafortune, S.J. who had lived
with the
King lslanders for over twenty years on their island home. On me
way back up to Alaska, after a visit
home, I stopped in Spokane, Washington at the Universities Jesuit
library. I spent
three days there copying Lafortune’s
records, the house diary and various other papers including a genealogy
that he
had started. The
following winter I started working in
earnest with this new detailed information.
When the Jesuits arrived, in 1900, they were baptizing
adults whose age
they estimated to be in the forties or fifties. They
asked not only the name of the person’s
mother and father but also the grandparents and beyond.
All of which they knew very clearly. There
was thus established a record dating
back to before contact
with Euro-
American people. The
first contact was
with the whaling ships from New England that started coming to the
Bering
Strait area the 1840s.
Lillian
came to Nome and we worked together
for ten days verifying and putting all this information together on one
sheet
of paper. This was all done by hand. She then put everything together
on one
paper color coding the families to make it easier to trace the
ancestors and
descendants. We
than had it printed and
mounted. We gave
copies to the King
Island Native Corporation and also mounted one copy in the parish hall
in Nome so
people had easy access to the entire genealogy.
It was a work of over twenty years and was
accomplished just a few months before we had to close the community in
Nome. It was a last
gift to the King
Island people who had made us part of their family.
Luckily there are quite a number of King
Island people who live in Anchorage where the group from Nome are now
stationed. We can
thus continue our
friendship with them. ![]() |