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(1928-2025)
For Sister Pauline Opliger, the path to becoming an Adrian Dominican Sister was a long and winding road.
Her father, Harry, was a Methodist minister originally from Millersburg, Ohio, while her mother, Della, an elementary schoolteacher at the time of their marriage, came from Lewiston, Nebraska. The two met and married in Glade, Kansas, where Harry was assigned.
Shortly after the wedding, Harry was transferred to a church in Rice, Kansas. The couple’s first three children were born in Rice: Pauline on March 2, 1928; Mark in 1930; and Lila in 1932.
Harry bought a small farm in north-central Kansas a few years later and left full-time ministry. It was a difficult time to be a Midwestern farmer; Sister Pauline wrote in her autobiography about her memories of massive dust storms and an invasion of grasshoppers that devoured the crops. Besides all that, “farming did not agree with my father,” she wrote, and he returned to full-time ministry and was assigned once again to Glade. Pauline’s youngest brother, Leland, entered the family there in 1939.
A couple of transfers later, the Opliger family was in Covert, Kansas, at the time of Pauline’s graduation from high school (in a class of four) in 1946. Wanting to save money to go to college and study art, she took summer classes in 1947 at Fort Hays State College in order to obtain a provisional teaching certificate, and that school year taught three elementary grades – containing a grand total of five students – in nearby Enterprise.
Read more about Sister Pauline (PDF)
Memorial gifts may be made to Adrian Dominican Sisters, 1257 East Siena Heights Drive, Adrian, MI, 49221. Funeral arrangements are being handled by Anderson-Marry Funeral Home, Adrian.
Sister's Memorial Card (PDF)
Recording of Sister Pauline's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Recording of Sister Pauline's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Leave your comments and remembrances – if you don't see the comment box below, click on the "Read More" link.
(1936-2025)
Just a few days before Christmas 1936, on December 22 to be exact, Vincent and Mary (Montgomery) Manners of Detroit welcomed their first child into the world, a daughter born at home whom they named Margaret Ann.
Margaret, or Peggy as she was known, was joined four years later by a sister, Sharon, and two years after that by a brother, Paul. Vincent was in the U.S. Army during World War II, and so Mary and the children lived with Mary’s parents and Mary worked as an information clerk at the Michigan Central Depot near downtown Detroit. Vincent did not return to the family after the war.
Peggy’s elementary schooling took place in three parochial schools, but the majority of it was at St. Gabriel, where she and her siblings also attended high school. The Adrian Dominican Sisters teaching there had a huge impact on Peggy.
“They were excellent teachers and I enjoyed their classes,” she wrote in a short autobiography. “I loved their spirit. It was this that inspired me to become an Adrian Dominican Sister.”
Even so, it seems the decision did not come all that easily. In his remembrance of his oldest sister shared after her death, Paul recalled that Peggy had been dating a “very nice” young man in high school and came home from the prom in tears. “When I asked her what happened to make her so upset, she said, ‘Now I have to choose between marriage and becoming a sister,’” Paul said.
Read more about Sister Margaret "Peggy" (PDF)
Recording of Sister Margaret's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Recording of Sister Margaret's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
(1946-2025)
To conclude her remembrance of Sister Sarajane Seaver, Pat Daly, a former president of the Dominican Institute of the Arts – who had once dubbed Sister Sarajane “Seaver the Weaver,” a nickname which stuck among the DIA membership – wrote:
Sarajane was a gifted weaver. Her pieces were works of art. She wove HERSELF as a beautiful thread into the fabric of my life and I’m blessed and grateful for it. Seaver the Weaver, thank you for the gift of your friendship. Rest in peace, my dear, dear friend.
Sarajane was born on January 16, 1946, in Adrian, the youngest of Glenn and Helen (Springer) Seaver’s four children after George William (known as Bill), Rosemary, and Tim.
As the family story goes, when Sarajane was just a few months old, Bill, who was seventeen years old when she was born, put her in his bicycle basket and took her to the convent at St. Mary Parish to show her off to his favorite teacher, Sister Mary Basil Sheridan. Sister Basil took the baby and placed her on the altar of the Blessed Mother, dedicating her to Mary. Helen, not knowing where Sarajane had gone, was on her knees praying the rosary for her safe return when Sister Basil called her to tell her what had happened. Sister Basil would later take full credit for Sarajane’s vocation.
Read more about Sister Sarajane (PDF)
Recording of Sister Sarajane's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Recording of Sister Sarajane's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Sister Marilyn Francoeur ended her autobiography with this paragraph:
The Land continues to draw me and I find great grace and peace in gardening and being close to the earth. Is this not my Indian heritage, my father’s legacy and longing to know more about this great cosmos that is part of everyone’s heritage? I trust that God will lead me in new pastures for “The Lord is My Shepherd.”
Sister Marilyn’s agrarian roots shaped her life’s story. She was born in Adrian on July 1, 1936, and grew up on her parents’ farm just outside the city.
Her father, Noel, was born in Martinton, Illinois, to a French-Indian family; his mother was one-quarter Potawatomi, giving Sister Marilyn one-sixteenth Citizen Potawatomi Nation blood. Her status as an enrolled member of the tribe was something of which she was very proud.
Noel came to Adrian when his parents, tired of renting farmland, bought a farm on Townline Highway in Adrian using the proceeds of his mother’s sale of the land in Oklahoma that she had been allotted as a Native American. He met his future wife, Ruth McKee, when he was with some baseball friends (he had his own semi-pro team, the Francoeur Eagles) who met up with their girlfriends at the Adrian movie theater where they worked – and where Ruth also worked.
After their 1935 marriage, Noel and Ruth lived in Adrian for a time before moving to their own 149-acre farm on Country Club Road. It was a difficult transition for a “city girl” who had never pumped her own water or used an outhouse, and to top things off, Ruth remembered the summer of 1936, when Marilyn was born, as the hottest on record.
The couple had five children; after Marilyn came Larry, Herline, Douglas, and John. All five of the children went to a one-room schoolhouse, and “I loved my time in the country school,” Sister Marilyn wrote, recalling field trips to the woods where the children identified flowers and birds and collected gunnysacks full of milkweed pods for the war effort (the pods were used as the stuffing for life jackets); being the only girl on the fifth-grade baseball team; and the one-room schoolhouse method of education, where children learned by hearing the lessons repeated over and over and by helping each other.
Read more about Sister Marilyn (PDF)
Recording of Sister Marilyn's Vigil Service - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Recording of Sister Marilyn's Funeral Mass - After clicking the link, download the recording by right-clicking on the video choosing "Save video as." Worship Aid (PDF)
Our Adrian Dominican cemetery with its circular headstones is a beautiful place of rest for women who gave their lives in service to God — and a peaceful place for contemplation and remembrance.
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