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 Mulgrave
In 1842, when the Basel Mission recruitment team visited Jamaica, Americo-Liberian, George Peter Thompson fell in love with the then 16-year old Catherine Mulgrave. Born in 1819, Thompson was orphaned as a child, he was taken to Europe by the Basel missionary, the Rev. J. F. Sessing. He was raised in a Beuggen mission house in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, from where the Pietist movement originated. Thompson had been educated as a mission assistant in Basel Mission training school and seminary in Basel, Switzerland. Upon the recommendation of the Moravian mission and the tacit approval of the Basel mission, Mulgrave though initially undecided accepted Thompson's proposal. It is on record that her patroness, Lady Mulgrave, who she was still in contact with, opposed to the union but before she could voice her concerns, the Basel team had already left for the Gold Coast, together with the recruited Caribbean missionaries and Mulgrave who had then married Thompson on 11 December 1842. Catherine Mulgrave had suffered a miscarriage on the voyage from the West Indies to Africa. Thompson and Mulgrave had their first child, a girl named Rosina in 1844. In 1846, she gave birth to her second child, a son baptised George.