GROSJEAN, MARIE CAROLINE (1870-1949)

GROSJEAN, MARIE CAROLINE, Sister St Helen of the Congregation of Notre Dame; teacher, and superior at Newcastle, 1926-32; b. near Cobourg, Ont., 22 Nov 1870, d/o Joseph Grosjean and Elizabeth Flood; entered religious life, 1890; d. Montreal, 17 May 1949.

After attending the collegiate school at Cobourg and a convent school in Peterborough, Ont., M. Caroline Grosjean entered the novitiate of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal. A teacher, she spent almost her whole career working in CND schools at Kingston and elsewhere in Ontario. Her only assignment in the Maritimes was the six years which she spent as superior at Newcastle.

After St Mary's Convent was lost to fire in 1924, during the brief superiority of Mary Ann McQuaid (Sister St Mary Elizabeth), the CND community at Newcastle had several acting superiors who served for only a few months or less and whose terms are not well-documented. From 1924 to 1926 the business affairs of the mission which would normally have been handled locally were conducted by the mother provincial, Mary Catherine Jane Doyle (Sister St Ignatius). Normalcy was restored with Grosjean's appointment in 1926. At this time the school was under the able management of Winnifred M. Gillis (Sister St Charles), and the main duty of the superior was to help plan and supervise the construction of a new convent. The three-storey brick structure which rose on the north side of King George Highway in Newcastle was financed by the CND and opened in the spring of 1932.

After leaving Newcastle in 1932, Grosjean was superior, successively, at Kingston and Brockville, Ont. She later assisted for a year at D'Arcy McGee High School in Montreal. She retired to the mother house some years prior to her death in 1949, at age seventy-eight.