She says she had her awkward moments when she began using Facebook and writing blog posts.

“But I knew I had to go there, that I had to do it,” said Lachance, who turned 70 on Sunday. “You have to go where the young people are. And that’s where they are.”

The number of nuns and sisters has plunged through the decades as more career opportunities for women opened, parochial schools closed and sisterhood became less visible. Generally, a nun lives a cloistered, contemplative life in a monastery, while sisters live and work within their communities.

In the U.S., the count has fallen from about 180,000 in 1965 to 55,000 last year, a drop of nearly 70 percent, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 2009, their median age was 73, with 91 percent of them 60 and older.

At one time, women would join the sisterhood through word of mouth or their personal interactions with sisters, said Lachance, vocation director for the Good Shepherd Sisters. But now, many younger women aren’t even aware it’s a choice.

For years, Lachance has visited Catholic schools, placed ads in religious publications and attended job fairs to recruit sisters. She’s still doing those things, but she has also turned to Facebook, her blog and YouTube. The order also updated its website and hired a public relations company.

It’s hard to sell somebody on committing to a religious life, with its vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in today’s world of slick technology, fast cash and material goods, Sister Dorina Chasse said on a recent day at St. Joseph Convent, a home along the Saco River in Biddeford where elderly and sick sisters are taken care of.

“It’s hard for them to leave that,” Chasse said.

Still, there’s been an uptick among women showing an interest in pursuing a religious life, said Patrice Tuohy of the National Religious Vocation Council, a Chicago-based group representing vocation directors for religious organizations.

The NRVC launched a website called VocationMatch.com seven years ago that links young people interested in leading religious lives to religious communities. The site gets about 6,000 inquiries a year.

The Internet is useful for such questions because it offers instant information and is anonymous, Tuohy said.

“For a 20-year-old to think about joining a religious community is an unusual decision, not to mention countercultural,” she said. “Someone who’s thinking about taking a vow of poverty and chastity goes counter to a culture that promotes sex and money and power.”

The Internet has made a huge difference in how religious communities are recruiting, Tuohy said. Besides websites and Facebook pages, some are using podcasts, YouTube videos and chat rooms. According to a 2009 study commissioned by NRVC, 87 percent of religious institutes had used the Internet for vocation promotion in the past five years.

“Many of the religious communities are very savvy,” Tuohy said. “I think people find this surprising, but in fact because they’re working with young people, they’re trying to stay in tune with young people — that’s who their market is, young men and women.”

Audra Turnbull, 23, turned to the Internet when she felt the calling in college. Inside the chapel at Quincy University in Quincy, Ill., she pulled out her laptop, Googled “nuns” and found a website called A Nun’s Life. In time, she checked out dozens of other websites, YouTube videos and social media before getting touch with a motherhouse in Monroe, Mich., where she plans to join the ministry.

Those tools are invaluable for “nunnabes” — wannabe nuns — like her, she said.

“It’s hard to find nuns these days to talk to them,” she said. “So a sister being interviewed or giving ministry on YouTube has been huge because you put yourself in that place and visualize what you want to be doing.”

Turnbull expects to become a sister in two to three years. She’s also created a blog of her own called The Awkward Catholic, which takes readers through the process of entering religious life.

For Lachance, she’s aiming to use the Internet to spread the word about religious opportunities and what religious life is like.

In the case of the Good Shepherd Sisters, the sisters work with women in distress, including women in prison or leaving it, pregnant single women, single mothers and women with substance abuse problems. They work at schools, food pantries and elsewhere in the community, recognizable through their white blouses, black skirts and vests, and black headdresses with veils.

But sisters also have interests and hobbies just like anybody else. Lachance is partial to Wii baseball and bowling video games, and she and her fellow sisters are big sports fans.

“On Super Bowl Sunday, we were watching with our pizza,” she said.

Results have been slow, with only 10 people liking the Good Shepherd Sisters’ Facebook page. But Lachance remains optimistic, as does Peggy Spino, her administrative assistant.

Some religious communities have just given up trying to attract new blood, said Spino.

“They say, ‘We’re not getting anybody. We’ll pray,’” she said. “Prayer is great, but you also have to have some action.”

She says she had her awkward moments when she began using Facebook and writing blog posts.

“But I knew I had to go there, that I had to do it,” said Lachance, who turned 70 on Sunday. “You have to go where the young people are. And that’s where they are.”

The number of nuns and sisters has plunged through the decades as more career opportunities for women opened, parochial schools closed and sisterhood became less visible. Generally, a nun lives a cloistered, contemplative life in a monastery, while sisters live and work within their communities.

In the U.S., the count has fallen from about 180,000 in 1965 to 55,000 last year, a drop of nearly 70 percent, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 2009, their median age was 73, with 91 percent of them 60 and older.

At one time, women would join the sisterhood through word of mouth or their personal interactions with sisters, said Lachance, vocation director for the Good Shepherd Sisters. But now, many younger women aren’t even aware it’s a choice.

For years, Lachance has visited Catholic schools, placed ads in religious publications and attended job fairs to recruit sisters. She’s still doing those things, but she has also turned to Facebook, her blog and YouTube. The order also updated its website and hired a public relations company.

It’s hard to sell somebody on committing to a religious life, with its vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in today’s world of slick technology, fast cash and material goods, Sister Dorina Chasse said on a recent day at St. Joseph Convent, a home along the Saco River in Biddeford where elderly and sick sisters are taken care of.

“It’s hard for them to leave that,” Chasse said.

Still, there’s been an uptick among women showing an interest in pursuing a religious life, said Patrice Tuohy of the National Religious Vocation Council, a Chicago-based group representing vocation directors for religious organizations.

The NRVC launched a website called VocationMatch.com seven years ago that links young people interested in leading religious lives to religious communities. The site gets about 6,000 inquiries a year.

The Internet is useful for such questions because it offers instant information and is anonymous, Tuohy said.

“For a 20-year-old to think about joining a religious community is an unusual decision, not to mention countercultural,” she said. “Someone who’s thinking about taking a vow of poverty and chastity goes counter to a culture that promotes sex and money and power.”

The Internet has made a huge difference in how religious communities are recruiting, Tuohy said. Besides websites and Facebook pages, some are using podcasts, YouTube videos and chat rooms. According to a 2009 study commissioned by NRVC, 87 percent of religious institutes had used the Internet for vocation promotion in the past five years.

“Many of the religious communities are very savvy,” Tuohy said. “I think people find this surprising, but in fact because they’re working with young people, they’re trying to stay in tune with young people — that’s who their market is, young men and women.”

Audra Turnbull, 23, turned to the Internet when she felt the calling in college. Inside the chapel at Quincy University in Quincy, Ill., she pulled out her laptop, Googled “nuns” and found a website called A Nun’s Life. In time, she checked out dozens of other websites, YouTube videos and social media before getting touch with a motherhouse in Monroe, Mich., where she plans to join the ministry.

Those tools are invaluable for “nunnabes” — wannabe nuns — like her, she said.

“It’s hard to find nuns these days to talk to them,” she said. “So a sister being interviewed or giving ministry on YouTube has been huge because you put yourself in that place and visualize what you want to be doing.”

Turnbull expects to become a sister in two to three years. She’s also created a blog of her own called The Awkward Catholic, which takes readers through the process of entering religious life.

For Lachance, she’s aiming to use the Internet to spread the word about religious opportunities and what religious life is like.

In the case of the Good Shepherd Sisters, the sisters work with women in distress, including women in prison or leaving it, pregnant single women, single mothers and women with substance abuse problems. They work at schools, food pantries and elsewhere in the community, recognizable through their white blouses, black skirts and vests, and black headdresses with veils.

But sisters also have interests and hobbies just like anybody else. Lachance is partial to Wii baseball and bowling video games, and she and her fellow sisters are big sports fans.

“On Super Bowl Sunday, we were watching with our pizza,” she said.

Results have been slow, with only 10 people liking the Good Shepherd Sisters’ Facebook page. But Lachance remains optimistic, as does Peggy Spino, her administrative assistant.

Some religious communities have just given up trying to attract new blood, said Spino.

“They say, ‘We’re not getting anybody. We’ll pray,’” she said. “Prayer is great, but you also have to have some action.”

___

Online:

Good Shepherd Sisters of Quebec: http://www.scimsisters.org/our-life/directors-welcome

A Nun’s Life: http://anunslife.org

The Awkward Catholic: http://theawkwardcatholic.blogspot.com

An expedition team used sonar imaging and more than 100,000 photos taken from underwater robots to create the map, which shows where hundreds of objects and pieces of the presumed-unsinkable vessel landed after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people.

Explorers of the Titanic — which sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City — have known for more than 25 years where the bow and stern landed after the vessel struck an iceberg. But previous maps of the floor around the wreckage were incomplete, said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic historian who consulted on the 2010 expedition. Studying the site with old maps was like trying to navigate a dark room with a weak flashlight.

“With the sonar map, it’s like suddenly the entire room lit up and you can go from room to room with a magnifying glass and document it,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever been done for the Titanic site.”

The mapping took place in the summer of 2010 during an expedition to the Titanic led by RMS Titanic Inc., the legal custodian of the wreck, along with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass., and the Waitt Institute of La Jolla, Calif.

They were joined by other groups, as well as the cable History channel. Details on the new findings at the bottom of the ocean are not being revealed yet, but the network will air them in a two-hour documentary on April 15, exactly 100 years after the Titanic sank.

The expedition team ran two independently self-controlled robots known as autonomous underwater vehicles along the ocean bottom day and night. The torpedo-shaped AUVs surveyed the site with side-scan sonar, moving at a little more than 3 miles per hour as they traversed back and forth in a grid along the bottom, said Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the expedition’s co-leader with RMS Titanic Inc. Dave Gallo from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was the other co-leader.

The AUVs also took high-resolution photos — 130,000 of them in all — of a smaller 2-by-3-mile area where most of the debris was concentrated. The photos were stitched together on a computer to provide a detailed photo mosaic of the debris.

The result is a map that looks something like the moon’s surface showing debris scattered across the ocean floor well beyond the large bow and stern sections that rest about half a mile apart.

The map provides a forensic tool with which scientists can examine the wreck site much the way an airplane wreck would be investigated on land, Nargeolet said.

For instance, the evidence that the stern rotated is based on the marks on the ocean floor to its west and the fact that virtually all the debris is found to the east.

“When you look at the sonar map, you can see exactly what happened,” said Nargeolet, who has been on six Titanic expeditions, the first in 1987.

The first mapping of the Titanic wreck site began after it was discovered in 1985, using photos taken with cameras aboard a remotely controlled vehicle that didn’t venture far from the bow and stern.

The mapping over the years has improved as explorers have built upon previous efforts in piecemeal fashion, said Charlie Pellegrino, a Titanic explorer who was not involved in the 2010 expedition. But this is the first time a map of the entire debris field has looked at every square inch in an orderly approach, he said.

“This is quite a significant map,” he said. “It’s quite a significant advance in the technology and the way it’s done.”

At Lone Wolf Documentary Group in South Portland, producers are putting the final touches on the History documentary. Rushmore DeNooyer, the co-producer and writer of the show, points out the different items on the map, displayed on a screen.

They include a huge tangle of the remains of a deckhouse; a large chunk of the side of the ship measuring more than 60 feet long and weighing more than 40 tons; pieces of the ship’s bottom; and a hatch cover that blew off of the bow section as it crashed to the bottom. Other items include five of the ship’s huge boilers, a revolving door and even a lightning rod from a mast.

By examining the debris, investigators can now answer questions like how the ship broke apart, how it went down and whether there was a fatal flaw in the design, he said.

The layout of the wreck site and where the pieces landed provide new clues on exactly what happened. Computer simulations will re-enact the sinking in reverse, bringing the wreckage debris back to the surface and reassembled.

Some of those questions will be answered on the show, said Dirk Hoogstra, a senior vice president at History. He declined to say ahead of the show what new theories are being put forth on the sinking.

“We’ve got this vision of the entire wreck that no one has ever seen before,” he said. “Because we have, we’re going to be able to reconstruct exactly how the wreck happened. It’s groundbreaking, jaw-dropping stuff.”