Catherine Mulgrave
Catherine Elisabeth Mulgrave also Gewe (19 November 1827 ─ 14 January 1891) was an Angolan-born Jamaican Moravian pioneer educator, administrator and missionary who accompanied a group of 24 Caribbean mission recruits from Jamaica and Antigua and arrived in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu, Accra in Ghana in 1843. Mulgrave was a leading figure in pedagogy and the education programme for girls in both Jamaica and on the Gold Coast. She was the Basel Mission’s first female teacher active on the Gold Coast. Under the auspices of the society, she played a pioneering role in the Christian women ministry of the Protestant movement in colonial Ghana. Catherine Mulgrave was also one of the first African woman teachers in the missionary educationalist system in Africa.
Catherine I of Russia
The life of Catherine I was said by Voltaire to be nearly as extraordinary as that of Peter the Great himself. There are no documents that confirm her origins. Said to have been born on 15 April 1684 (o.s. 5 April), she was originally named Marta Helena Skowrońska. Marta was the daughter of Samuel Skowroński (later spelt "Samuil Skavronsky"), a Roman Catholic peasant from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth born to Minsker parents, who in 1680 married Dorothea Hahn at Jakobstadt. Her mother is named in at least one source as Elizabeth Moritz, the daughter of a Baltic German woman and there is debate as to whether Moritz's father was a Swedish officer. It is likely that two stories were conflated, and Swedish sources suggest that the Elizabeth Moritz story is probably incorrect. Some biographies state that Marta's father was a gravedigger and handyman, while others speculate that he was a runaway landless serf.