Mary MacKillop in what is now the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, Victoria (at the time part of an area called Newtown in the then British colony of New South Wales), to Alexander MacKillop and Flora MacDonald. Although she continued to be known as "Mary", when she was baptised six weeks later she received the names Maria Ellen. MacKillop's parents lived in Roybridge, Inverness-shire, Scotland, prior to emigrating to Australia. MacKillop visited the village in the 1870s where the local Catholic church, St Margaret's, now has a shrine to her. MacKillop's father, Alexander MacKillop, born in Perthshire, had been educated at the Scots
Church of the Immaculate Conception (Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana) in 1853. The second chapel, a room in the new Providence motherhouse (1853), served the Sisters of Providence until 1863, when a simple frame chapel designed by Indianapolis architect Diedrich A. Bohlen was completed. Although Bohlen's frame chapel was large, capable of seating 300 people, it was only intended to be a temporary structure until a more substantial church could be erected at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. From the time of her arrival at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Saint Mother Guérin hoped to establish a new church to honor the Immaculate Conception. Prior to her death in 1856, she began to gather materials to