Lydia Longley

Lydia Longley (Sainte-Madeleine) (12 April 1674 – 20 July 1758),[1] an English colonist from Groton, Massachusetts, in the mid-20th century became known as "The First American Nun" from a popular 1958 children's novel about her decades in a Catholic congregation in Montreal, New France.

Born into a Puritan family in Groton, Massachusetts, Longley and a younger sister and brother were taken captive by Abenaki raiders in July 1694 during King William's War.

About two years after the raid, Lydia-Madeleine entered the non-cloistered Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal, a Roman Catholic teaching and nursing order established there in the seventeenth century.

Her cousin Sarah Tarbell, taken in a 1704 raid in Groton, was also ransomed in Montreal, studied and baptized as Catholic, and took the name Marguerite before joining the Congregation.

During King Philip's War, the Longley family was forced to flee and traveled east for safety to Charlestown, a district of Boston.

They had massacred settlers at Oyster River Plantation (modern-day Durham, New Hampshire), but some raided the Groton area for more bounty.

The Abenaki killed all the Longley family except Lydia, aged twenty-one, and two of her seven siblings, seventeen-year-old Betty and twelve-year-old John.

[2]Lydia was soon bartered by her captors as they fled north along the Merrimack River: she was sold to the Pennacook Indians, whose settlement was located in what is today Concord, New Hampshire, probably in exchange for food.

These likely included Jeanne Le Ber, a daughter of Jacques, who was a noted recluse and would a short time later enter the Congregation de Notre Dame as a nun.