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Meet the Deaconesses  A-F

Anna Ellison Butler Alexander (1865-1947) was born to newly emancipated slaves on Butler Plantation in McIntosh County, Georgia. She was set aside as a Deaconess in the Episcopal Church in 1907 and founded Good Shepherd Church in the Pennick community where she taught children to read (by tradition using the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible) in a one-room schoolhouse. She ministered in Pennick for 53 years. Alexander was named a Saint in the Diocese of Georgia in 1998 with the Feast Day of September 24th.
PictureSt. Clement's
Anna R. Armstrong was born on 31 January 1873 and was set apart as deaconess in 1908 by Bishop David H. Greer of New York, after graduation from the Training School at Grace Church. Anna spent the majority of her diaconal life in the diocese of New York. From 1909 until 1917 she served various churches in the Bronx including St. Martha’s and St. James in Fordham. After a brief tenure at St. Peter’s Church in Westchester, Anna settled into an eleven-year term at St. Clement’s Church located in Manhattan’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. While serving at St. Clement’s, Anna, who had a theatrical background, produced many plays and pageants. Due to failing health, Anna retired from active parish service in 1940 and became co-supervisor of St. Clare’s Home in Upper Red Hook, New York. She later retired to St. Anne’s Guest House and Convent in Kingston, where she died at the age of 87 on 29 August 1960. Her funeral was held at Christ Church, Red Hook. She is buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist in Barrytown, along with several other deaconesses. [research of Deacon Geri Swanson]
Evelyn May Ashcroft
​From The Living Church, February 3, 1946.
Transcribed by Wayne Kempton
Archivist and Historiographer of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, 2008

Miss Ashcroft was a missionary in the district of Shanghai at the outbreak of the war between China and Japan. She was transferred to the Philippine Islands, to work in All Saints' School, Bontoc. After Pearl Harbor, she was interned by the Japanese with the other Americans first in Baguio and then in Bilibid Prison, Manila. Miss Ashcroft felt the call to the diaconate of women while in Baguio internment camp. She studied for the examinations required by canon 50 then and there. At the time when she was ready to take the examinations, the men and women of the camp were separated by a barbed wire fence. Bishop Wilner, Suffragan of the Philippines, and the Rev. Wayland S. Mandell and the Rev. Clifford E. Barry Nobes, members of the standing committee, gave her the examinations, across the barrier. Read the full article.
Anna Maynard Barbour was born in Mannsville, NY in 1854. After the death of her parents, she took a course in stenography. In March of 1893 she married W. James Barbour in St. Paul and Anna began her career writing mystery novels. Soon after her husband’s death in 1903, Anna began her studies at The Church Training Deaconesses Home in Philadelphia, graduating in 1908. She was set apart as deaconess by Bishop Ozi William Whitaker the following year. From there she was assigned to a post in Boston at The House of Mercy, institutions for "fallen women" that operated from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century.  Read her full bio.
Harriet Bedell was born in Buffalo, New York on March 19, 1875. Inspired by an Episcopal missionary, she enrolled as a student at the New York Training School for Deaconesses, where she was instructed in religion, missions, teaching, and health. She then became a missionary-teacher among the Cheyenne at the Whirlwind Mission in Oklahoma.
In 1916, Bedell was sent to Stevens Village, Alaska, where she was set apart as a deaconess in 1922. She also served as a teacher and nurse at St. John’s in the Wilderness at Allakaket, just 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle, from which she sometimes traveled by dogsled to remote villages. During her last years in Alaska, Bedell opened a boarding school.
In 1932, hearing about the plight of the Seminoles in Florida, Bedell used her own salary to reopen a mission among the Mikasuki Indians. Read more.  From Lesser Feasts and Fasts, January 8th.  
(Celebration from the Diocese of Southwest Florida.)
Presentation on Deaconess Harriet Bedell, by Deacon Tracie Middleton. Looks at Bedell's early deaconess training, her work at Whirlwind Mission in Oklahoma, Stevens Village in Alaska, in Allakaket, near the Arctic Circle, the Florida Everglades Seminole community, and more.
Edith A. Booth was born in England and died at the age of 91 in Kissimmee, Florida on Feb. 2, 1997 where she was in residence from 1972 until her death. In Florida she attended St John’s Episcopal Church in Kissimmee. Booth served the nationwide deaconess community as Secretary of the National Conference of Deaconesses during the 1940’s. She served as deaconess in the Tucson, Arizona area. In 1949 she directed the Handicraft Guild of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia. She personally taught woodworking to boys whose homes were located in an isolated area of the state. 
Charlotte Boyd was born in 1872. She was set apart as deaconess on 6 May 1901. Her primary ministry was to the St. Bartholomew Girls’ Club. She also was director of the summer home and farm St. Bartholomew’s sponsored in Pawling, New York. During World War I, Deaconess Boyd oversaw the work of St. Bartholomew’s Red Cross Chapter, dispensing 48,500 handwrapped surgical dressings and 1,659 hand-knitted garments to American troops in France and Belgium. When asked what part of her training was most influential in her life as a deaconess, Boyd replied: “To have known Dr. [William Reed] Huntington and to have felt his influence has been the greatest inspiration.” Boyd left St. Bartholomew’s in 1931 and, after a trip to England, took up her work at Ascension in Manhattan. She retired in 1957 after 56 years of active church work and died on 17 January 1965 in Quebec, Canada, where she lived with her sister. She was 92 at the time of her death. [research of Deacon Geri Swanson]
PictureIcon by Sister Ellen Francis Poisson
Ruth Byllesby grew up in Meadville, PA, daughter to the rector of Christ Church (Meadville). She attended the Philadelphia Church Training and Deaconess House in New York and was its 10th graduate. She was set apart in 1896 in Pittsburgh and worked with mill families in Pittsburgh, New Jersey, and Detroit. In 1927 she moved to Augusta, GA, her family's winter town, because she wanted to work in a neighborhood whose residents relied largely on textile mills. She served at Christ Church, Augusta during the Great Depression and World War II. During the Depression she opened the rectory to the public, caring for the sick and homeless and providing food to children. On April 15, 2012 the Episcopal Bishop of Georgia went to Christ Church, Augusta to declare Ruth Byllesby, a deaconess of the Episcopal Church, a saint. 
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Collect: Almighty God, who chose your servant Ruth Ellis Byllesby to serve the poor, feed the hungry, and clothe your children: give us the grace to pattern our lives after the shining example of Blessed Ruth, that we may spread the Gospel by helping those in need, with humility and the heart of a servant, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

​Watch an online presentation on Deaconess Ruth, by the Episcopal Women's History Project. Dr. Joan Gunderson tells the story of Deaconess Ruth Byliesby.
Clara Carter had a varied ministry. In 1902 she went to Alaska and helped to establish two hospitals, one in Skagway and the other in Anchorage. Later in her life she became the head of the Philadelphia Deaconess school. 
Blanche Henriques DeLeon, a graduate of St Faith’s/The New York School for Deaconesses, was originally from Washington, DC. Deaconess DeLeon served the congregation of St. Bartholomew's in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century. Later she left the Order of Deaconesses of her own volition, and entered the sisterhood known as the Order of St. Mary, where she took the name Sister Ignatia. She was named Sister Superior of the Trinity Mission House on Fulton Street, Manhattan, NYC in 1918.
Emma Britt Drant was essential to the establishment of the Episcopal Church in the territory of Hawaii, a place that the Anglican Church was also interested in evangelizing. Deaconess Drant learned Cantonese and was part of the founders of the Episcopal Church and Mission of St Elizabeth in Honolulu's Palama district in 1904. Drant later left for San Francisco where she began mission work among the Chinese and in 1905 called together a worshiping community to be called True Sunshine Episcopal Mission. After the 1906 earthquake, many residents of San Francisco, including many Chinese, fled across the bay to Oakland, and a second Chinese mission took root there. In 1910 Deaconess Drant relinquished her work in the diocese in order to move back East to attend to her brother.
Phyllis Edwards was one of the first women ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. She was a civil rights activist who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and fought for the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church. She was ordained to the diaconate in 1965 by California Bishop James Pike. (General Convention didn't officially recognize women deacons until 1970.) 

A native of Chicago, Edwards earned bachelor's and master's degrees in education from Black Hills Teachers College in Spearfish, South Dakota, while teaching elementary school and raising four children. In 1962 she enrolled in Seabury-Western Seminary to become a deaconess. In 1964, after graduation, she was sent to work in the Mission District in San Francisco.  Read the full article.
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