Sophie Bailly was twenty years old, of French-Odawa parentage, and training to be a teacher when she worked her sampler under the instruction of her adoptive cousin and teacher Marianne Schindler Fisher. The daughter of a French-Odawa woman, Bead-Way-Way (Angelique McGulpin), and fur trader Joseph Bailly, Sophie also was the adopted daughter of powerful fur trader Madame Magdeline Marcot La Framboise, in whose home Sophie learned to stitch.