Donne di Merito Award2023 Historical recipient - Sister Blandina Segale (1850-1941)
Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), negative no. 067735Sister Blandina was born Rosa Maria Segale January 24, 1850 in Ciagna, a little mountain town near Genoa. When she was four, her family emigrated to the United States and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. At sixteen she entered the Sisters of Charity and professed her vows in 1868. Six years after starting her service as a teacher in schools in Ohio, she was sent, alone, over the Santa Fe Trail to Trinidad in the Colorado Territory in 1872 to teach in the public school. One of her first actions was to fight against the common practice of lynching. In 1877, she moved to Santa Fe where she served in the schools, orphanage, and hospital operated by the Sisters of Charity. She also served in Albuquerque, where she taught and opened a Wayfarers’ House and became a defender of Native Americans and Mexicans. She returned to Trinidad in 1889 and also spent a short time in Pueblo, Colorado before returning to Ohio in 1897, where she and her sister, now Sister Justine, worked with the Italian immigrant community. She died in February 1941 at the age of 91. In her life in the West, Sister had many adventures which she kept in a diary so she could share it with her sister. The diary, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, was published in 1948. The diary has become material for novels, histories, television and even a comic book. Sister Blandina’s cause for Canonization has been received by the Vatican and she now bears the title Servant of God.