Katharine Drexel: Foundress, Philanthropist, and Prisoner?

Katharine Drexel: Founder, Philanthropist, Prisoner?

Combing through genealogical databases requires a positive attitude, a keen eye, and a sense of humor. The positive attitude is to keep you motivated when information and sources are scarce, of poor quality, or little obvious use; the keen eye is for finding useful and interesting items; and the sense of humor is for maintaining your positive attitude when your mistakes or the inadequacy (or inaccuracy) of sources begins to get you down.
I knew if I wanted to find documents pertaining to Mother (Mary) Katharine Drexel in her youth I would have to use her name prior to her taking vows: Catherine Mary Drexel, which is what I put into Ancestry.com.[1] I tried a few other spelling variations, using vs. omitting her middle name, etc. but many of the results were obituaries behind a paywall from Newspapers.com or false positives: both her names were incredibly common, even just within the Drexel family. It felt like an agonizing game of trial and error for what combination of name spelling and degree of exactness I should search with. Moreover, I didn’t want to limit it to Philadelphia or PA, lest I miss anything from while she was living or visiting elsewhere, though eventually I changed my tune and found greater success.
I took a brief pause and looked at ProQuest and a few other niche databases such as Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920’s, looking for newspaper articles on Drexel, specifically for personal articles, obituaries, etc. My favorite find was her petition to Roosevelt to sign the Anti-Lynching bill, but this and similar items were less suited to this assignment which focuses more on genealogy, though I can still use this in later research, so it’s not a loss.[2]
I should admit that the whole time I was really hoping to find a birth certificate or baptism record to prove her birth name, so that was my focus when I returned to Ancestry. Instead of putting “Catherine Drexel” into the search though, I put in her father’s name, “Francis Anthony Drexel.” Francis’ name should be with hers on censuses until his death, as well as on birth records and so on, but could come up better in searches, so it seemed worth a try. This brought me three more census results, two for 1870 and one for 1880, which had M. Katharine listed as Katie and Catharine. Alas, still no birth record, so I returned to trying variants of Kate and Catherine.

Often when these documents get digitized, AI or other programs are used to read the (sometimes hardly legible) handwriting. On the 1930 census, the AI interpreted “President” as “Prisoner”—certainly not the role you would expect for a saintly nun, but a good reminder to not only read the transcripts.[3] Others were more mild, tagging “Catharine” as “Cathaine” or “Drexel” as “Dregel.”[4] Some of these were then manually tagged with “(Mother) Katharine Drexel” but others were not and could have easily been missed without broadening the search to similar results, especially as without misreadings, her name was recorded as Katie, Catharine, Katharine, and Catherine, occasionally with an “M.” added for “Mary.”[5]

Then I found Kate M Drexel’s passport application. Kate was born May 15^th, 1861, three years after Mother Katharine (November 26^th, 1858), as per the SBS website.[6] I would have written it off quickly as a relative with a similar name, but attached to it was a note asking for passports for Kate M, Elizabeth L, and Lousie B, the same names and middle initials of the three daughters of Francis A Drexel both as per secondary sources and as in the census records.[7] The application also featured a description of Kate, which seems to match Mother Katharine pretty well, specifically “large” referring to her nose and “round” for her chin.[8] But for this passport to be hers, either the birthdate must be false, or her birthdate elsewhere must be false, which is unlikely as Katharine’s mother died the month following her birth.[9]

Now I really wanted to find a birth certificate. While I thoroughly doubted that her mother’s death was miss recorded or that she was actually the daughter of her father’s second wife, I wanted certainty. Census records show Katharine’s age matching a 1858 birth give or take one year—not three—pointing to a false passport application. Ancestry evidently did not have Katharine’s birth certificate or baptism record. I went back to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament website in hopes they had cited something, but all the Archives page had was an announcement that they moved their archives in 2017 to the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.[10] However, the biography section noted that Francis Drexel married his second wife, Emma Bouvier, in Old St. Joseph’s church.[11] It seemed possible that if they were married there, that Katharine was baptized there, too.

St. Joseph’s website had a similar message to the SBS website, however, it had links to the digitized collections put together by the Archdiocese’ Catholic Historical Research Center and the genealogical research service FindMyPast.[12] Dickinson does not pay for a subscription to this service, but I was able to make a free account, which strictly limited my access, but I was lucky, and my first search brought me directly to the baptism and birth record of Mother Katharine, dating her birth to “Nov 26, 1858.” Though, troublingly, it’s hard to make out if her name is Catharine or Catherine.[13] Still, I am amazed by how far things came from dead ends and false positives to dozens of documents, future research topics, and a genuine excitement to find more. First on my mind is answering why the false birthday on the passport application or was there another Kate M Drexel just three years younger than the Catholic saint going abroad with the saint’s sisters the same year the saint was meeting the Pope in Rome?[14]

[1] “Katharine Drexel,” Wikipedia, March 23, 2025, [WEB].

[2] “Requests that Franklin D. Roosevelt Promote Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill.” In Department of Justice Classified Subject Files on Civil Rights, 1914-1949; Department of Justice General Records, Entry 112-B, Straight Numerical Files, #158260, 1934. [ProQuest].

[3] 1930 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “M Katherine Dregel,” [Ancestry].

[4] 1880 United States Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Cathaine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census.

[5] 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katie Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23 (2^nd enum), Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1880 US Census.

[6] “St. Katharine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[7] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS; 1870 US Census; 1870 US Census (2^nd enum); 1880 US Census; 1900 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katharine M Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1910 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine M Dorexel,” [Ancestry]; 1920 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Mother M Katharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census; 1940 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine Dresel,” [Ancestry]; 1950 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[8] U.S. Passport Applications 1795-1925, July 1886, digital image s.v. “Kate M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[9] “Hannah Jane Langstroth Drexel,” Find a Grave, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB]; “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[10] “Archives,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[11] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[12] “Genealogy,” Old Saint Joseph’s Church, 2023, [WEB].

[13] “Philadelphia Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms,” Philadelphia, Philadelphia South, Pennsylvania, 1858, FindMyPast, [FindMyPast].

[14] “St. Katharine Drexel” SBS.