Sarah Hannah Roberta Grier Coome (October 28, 1837 – February 9, 1921) was a Canadian Anglican religious sister who founded the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine and was its first mother superior.
John Grier, a high church Anglican priest who had emigrated from Ireland in 1823 and been ordained in Quebec, and his wife Eliza Lilias Geddes.
On July 23, 1859, Hannah married civil engineer Charles Horace Coome, who worked on the Grand Trunk Railway, and the couple initially lived in Kingston.
While in Britain, Hannah became acquainted with the Oxford Movement as well as the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage and felt drawn to mission work.
[3] In June 1882, Coome and Amelia Elizabeth (Aimée) Hare travelled to Peekskill, New York, for two years' formation at the Sisters of St Mary, a relatively new Anglican educational and nursing order led by Harriet Starr Cannon, while the Canadian group did further fundraising and organization, including within the Family Compact for which Rose and Coome may have qualified.
Early in their ministry, Coome, Aimee and various postulants experienced taunts from Protestants who considered their uniform, similar to widow's garb at the time, excessively "papist" (Roman Catholic).
[9] In 1886 the new order accepted responsibility for a house on Larch Street from the parish of St. George the Martyr,[10] designed to care for the elderly, although at the time no sisters other than Mother Hannah had taken full religious vows.
In 1906, the sisterhood built the Church Home for the Aged at Bellevue and Oxford Streets in the Kensington neighborhood, and added another wing the following year.
Increasingly over time, the community not only trained nurses and ministered to the elderly, but also ran schools and orphanages, serving the handicapped and poor in both large cities and rural areas.
The order she founded at various times had houses in Ontario, Quebec (mission work at the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Montreal), Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan (Qu'Appelle Diocesan School in Regina), and Alberta (St. John's House for unmarried mothers), as well as continued to maintain relations with similar orders in the United States and England.