Last month, sisters Sarah and Katelyn Freiberger, of Lexington, South Carolina, traveled to Luxembourg to apply for citizenship accompanied by their parents Sherri and Eric. What made the family’s trip extra special was knowing that 151 years ago, their ancestor, a Luxembourg immigrant living in Frenchtown, Ohio, traveled to Luxembourg and took back to Ohio a religious statue that became one of the most renowned in the United States. 

Their ancestor, Frank Collet, the girls’ great-great-great grandfather and Sherri’s great-great-grandfather, went back to Luxembourg in 1875 to marry his hometown girlfriend Mary Josephine Guillaume. On the return trip to Ohio, the newly married couple, along with fellow Luxembourg immigrant Nicholas Warnament, also of Frenchtown, carried along with them a three-foot wooden statue of Our Lady of Luxembourg. 

The Rev. Joseph Gloden, the Luxembourg immigrant priest and pastor in Frenchtown and Carey, Ohio, who dreamed of building a shrine to Our Lady of Luxembourg in Carey, Ohio, had requested that the men acquire the statue on their trip in 1875. This statue was ultimately placed in what became the Basilica & National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey and is the best-known statue of her in the United States. To this day, tens of thousands of people make annual pilgrimages to the shrine in Carey to pray in front of the cherished statue. 

While in Luxembourg, the family stopped at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Luxembourg City to pay tribute to the original 1624 Our Lady of Luxembourg statue. The 1875 statue at the Basilica & National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio, Sherri’s hometown and parish, is an exact replica of the original statue in Luxembourg.