Family tree of Thérèse de LISIEUX
Saint
Born Marie Françoise Thérèse MARTIN
French Carmelite nun
Born on January 2, 1873 in Alençon, France , France
Died on September 30, 1897 in Lisieux, France
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Louis and Zélie met in 1858 and married only three months later. They had nine children, of whom only five daughters--Marie, Pauline, Léonie, Céline and Thérèse--survived to adulthood. Zélie was so successful in manufacturing lace that Louis sold his watchmaking shop to a nephew and handled the traveling and bookkeeping end of her lacemaking business.
... Thérèse Martin was the daughter of Louis Martin, a watchmaker and jeweller, and Zélie Guérin, a lacemaker. Both her parents were devout Catholics. Louis had tried to become a monk, wishing to enter the Augustinian Monastery of the Great St Bernard, but had been refused because he knew no Latin. Zélie, possessed of a strong active temperament, wished to serve the sick, and had knocked on the door of the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul — but was rejected because the superior felt she had no vocation to the religious life. Instead, she asked God to give her many children and let them all be consecrated to God.
Louis and Zélie met in 1858 and married only three months later. They had nine children, of whom only five daughters--Marie, Pauline, Léonie, Céline and Thérèse--survived to adulthood. Zélie was so successful in manufacturing lace that Louis sold his watchmaking shop to a nephew and handled the traveling and bookkeeping end of her lacemaking business.
In the six years before Thérèse was born, Zélie Martin faced many challenges in her business and in the health of her children. Her third child, Léonie, suffered convulsions. In 1867 and 1868 her first two sons, (Marie-Joseph-Louis and Marie Jean-Baptiste), died when five and eight months old respectively. Meanwhile, she considered herself "a slave to the lace business" and often ran fevers. In 1870 Marie-Hélène, a lovable child of five and a half, also died in Zélie's arms after a painful illness, at a time when there was no vaccination. Marie-Mélanie-Thérèse died an infant, less than two months old, in October 1870. But Zélie was determined to have one more child and to keep it alive. That last child, the second Thérèse, barely survived but grew to become a saint.
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Geographical origins
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