The vow she kept for the rest of her life

Catherine Ascherl was born in Stockau, near Pilsen in Bohemia, and sent as a teenager to serve wealthy Ascherl relatives in Vienna — stained-glass craftsmen who treated her badly. Around 1877 she sailed for New York alone and took a flat at 119 Pitt Street on the Lower East Side, a block from the Capuchin church.

She sent most of what she earned back to Bohemia. It was enough: the rest of the family landed before 1882 on her wages.

When her mother nearly died bearing the youngest sister, Katie made a private vow — if God spared her mother ten years, she would raise the baby herself and never marry. Her mother lived. When the young man she had been seeing came back a decade later she told him she was too old. She kept the vow for the rest of her life.