In the 1890s, a girl of unspecified West-African origin found herself in the care of a group of Catholic Missionaries stationed in the Algerian Mzab community of Ghardaïa calling themselves the Soeurs Missionaires de Notre Dame d’Afrique (or ‘Soeurs Blanches’). The missionaries dubbed her Mabrouka. Though she arrived speaking neither French nor Arabic, she was eventually able to share her story, from her kidnapping, to her trans-Saharan voyage with her Tuareg captors, to sale into slavery in the Mzab Valley, to her ‘ransom’ by the missionaries. The nuns published her account for French audiences in a pamphlet entitled “Mabrouka: Histoire d’une petite négresse.” Many such women and girls passed through the stations of the Soeurs Blanches during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, often given the same moniker of ‘Mabrouka.’ The Soeurs Blanches were established in the 1860s as the ‘feminine wing’ of the all-male ‘Pères Blancs,’ and within some ten years, sisters were recruited from across the francophone world to evangelize Muslim women. This paper considers the intersecting histories of the suppression of slavery and the re-articulation of kinship and ‘family’ in colonial Algeria through a study of these missionary stations and the women whose lives they briefly touched and often recorded. The experiences of these ‘redeemed captives’ are re-created using material from French colonial archives as well as published and unpublished letters, periodicals, diaries, and photographs from various missionary archives. Though slavery in the French Empire was outlawed in 1848, the trans-Saharan trade persisted, and French military forces continued to intercept Tuareg slave caravans passing through the Mzab. For the Catholic sisters, these sub-Saharan women figured as perpetual “orphans,” lacking kinship ties and social networks, and were thus ideal candidates for conversion. Moreover, these “redeemed” individuals became crucial to the formation of Christian households, or 'ménages Chrétiennes,' the cornerstone of their greater mission to “reclaim North Africa” for the Roman Church. In the Mzab, most of the captives ‘redeemed’ by the missionaries were women whose status either as slaves or as wives was often unclear. While the material and legal distinction between marriage and slavery in this time and place was (and remains historiographically) murky, the missionaries’ efforts were based on an understanding of all Muslims as polygamous and all Muslim women as slaves/concubines. Thus, monogamous marriage was a critical element of the missionaries’ redemption narrative. The women themselves, however, did not always acquiesce to the missionaries’ ambitions.