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and teachers to warm their feet during study and meals. The
sisters, who had cloaks, wore them all day long. Several also
made hoods and wore them throughout the day. In the
classrooms there was usually both a chimney fire and a
stove. Regardless, the nuns write of watching the ink freeze
in the children's pens and feeling as if their feet would freeze
off from the wind gushing under the washboards.
In 1844, a small group of sisters from Kaskaskia,
including Sisters Isabella King and Josephine Barber, moved
further west to the City of St. Louis, Missouri to establish a
new house and school. In April of 1845 the remainder of the
Kaskaskian nuns, barely escaping the raging floodwaters of
the Mississippi, reunited with their St. Louis sisters in their
Sixth Street Monastery.
In 1871, Sister Genevieve was once again nominated
superior and charged to establish a monastery in Dubuque,
Iowa. The discomforts of the Dubuque house and the
severity of the climate brought on the disease to which she
eventually succumbed. In 1873, Sister Genevieve returned to
St. Louis and spent two years in the infirmary. On April 9,
1877, at the age of 76, Sister Genevieve died at the St. Louis
Monastery, then located on Cabanne.
By 1877, Sister Genevieve's niece, Edwardina Queen
Slye, her great-nephew Henry Slye and her great-nieces
Catherine Slye and Jessie Slye Thomson were permanent
residents of the city. Three of Jessie's daughters would join a