"[3] Rose Hawthorne and her siblings were raised in a positive environment and their parents did not believe in harsh discipline or physical punishment.

[4] On July 28, 1851, Sophia took Hawthorne and her older sister, Una, to visit relatives in West Newton, Massachusetts.

"[6] Two years after Nathaniel's death in 1864, Hawthorne was enrolled at a boarding school run by Diocletian Lewis in nearby Lexington, Massachusetts; she disliked the experience.

In the spring of 1879, Rose and her husband purchased her family's former home in Concord, The Wayside, with borrowed funds, where they lived until their son Francis died of diphtheria at the age of five in 1881.

[14] In 1883, Julian planned to publish Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, a manuscript left unfinished by their father, but Rose did not believe in its existence and suspected him of forgery or perpetrating a hoax.

[15] In New London, the Lathrops became involved with the Catholic summer school movement and collaborated on a book, A Story of Courage: A History of the Georgetown Visitation Convent.

Their travels through England, Portugal, France and Italy [had] exposed the Hawthornes to the 'Roman Church,' often misunderstood in the Protestant circles of New England … Hawthorne would write of her experience at the age of seven of seeing Pope Pius IX during Holy Week from his balcony: "I became eloquent about the Pope, and was rewarded by a gift from my mother of a little medallion of him and a gold scudo with an excellent likeness thereon, both always tenderly reverenced by me.

[18] Hawthorne sought greater purpose in her life and spent time with the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, becoming inspired by their motto, "I am for God and for the poor.

"[21] As a source for her motivation to work with incurable impoverished people, she cited the story of a young seamstress who was too poor to afford medical treatment and instead had herself admitted to an institution for the insane on Blackwell's Island.

In October 1896, she rented three rooms in a tenement on Scammel Street[23] on the Lower East Side, a poor immigrant neighborhood,[24] with the help of an assistant named Alice Huber.

[27] Hawthorne's brother, Julian, considered her decision to be a martyrdom, writing, "Nothing less than the extreme would satisfy her thirst for self-sacrifice.

On April 18, 1926, the Rotary Club of New York presented her with a service medal as "soldier of love, a friend of the poor, organizer of rare ability, hope of the hopeless".