Mother Ferrow

The Legend

The Church of TGII teaches that Mother Ferrow was a widow who died shielding a collapsing tenement full of children during an early Clockworks disaster, decades before the city had proper fire wardens. She's said to appear to the grieving, the frightened, and occasionally the merely lost, always as an older woman offering bread, never asking for thanks.
  It's a lovely story. I've heard perhaps forty variations of it, and every single congregation swears theirs is the accurate one.
  The trouble, as I mentioned, is that she doesn't appear anywhere in the actual record. Not in the fire wardens' logs. Not in the tenement registries. Not in a single contemporary account from the disaster she's supposedly central to.

Where I Think She Actually Came From

My own theory, which I offer with the usual caveats about my own biases, is that Mother Ferrow was invented by the Church roughly two generations after the disaster she's attached to, at a point when the Church badly needed a comforting local figure the lower districts would trust more than clergy.
  It worked rather too well. She's since become more real to most District Nine residents than half the actual historical figures I've spent my career documenting.
  I don't entirely blame the Church for inventing her, whatever else I think of their current leadership. People needed someone to have died protecting them. When no one real fit, someone made sure somebody did.
  What troubles me more, professionally, is how completely the invention has outgrown its inventors. Ask the current clergy about Mother Ferrow's exact origins and they'll cite the same forty variations everyone else does, with no more certainty than the woman who left me bread. The Church didn't just invent a comforting figure. It forgot, somewhere along the way, that it had.
  I've considered publishing my findings formally, more than once. I've never done it. A woman who never lived is currently doing more good in District Nine than most of the people who did.
  The bread on my windowsill, for the record, was very good. I ate it before I finished being annoyed about the theology.