Hannah Grier Coome
Canadian Anglican nun (1837-1921)
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.
Early and family life
Sarah Hannah Roberta Grier was born in the Carrying Place, Upper Canada, to the Rev. 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. Hannah (as she preferred to be known by) was their third daughter and sixth child. Her parents took responsibility for her education at home, which also for a time was in Belleville. One sister, Rose Jane Elizabeth Grier, became a teacher, and ultimately principal of the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto. 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.
In 1862, Charles Coome accepted an engineering job in Britain, and the couple moved across the Atlantic. 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hannah Grier Coome” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.