CHICAGO — Robert Francis Prevost, originally from Chicago, ascended to the papacy as Pope Leo XIV on Thursday. Documentation reveals his family’s African American heritage, tracing back to New Orleans, Louisiana.
ABC News acquired various documents, including U.S. Census data from the early 20th century, showing that the family lineage of the first American pope is intertwined with the nation’s multifaceted racial past.
Both of Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, are described as Black or mulatto in several census documents.
The marriage license from 1887 listed Martinez’s place of birth as Haiti, while birth records indicate he was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Chris Smothers, a genealogist with 15 years of experience and a historian at Simmons University, informed ABC News that these areas were considered the same region at that time. Meanwhile, Baquié’s birth records confirm her birth in New Orleans.
Despite Martinez being born abroad, his father — the pope’s great-grandfather — was found to be from Louisiana, Smothers said, emphasizing the pope’s ancestry in the American South.
“It’s clear that the Pope has centuries-long ties to free people of color in Louisiana,” Smothers told ABC News.
On the 1900 census, while his family lived in New Orleans, both Leo XIV’s maternal grandparents and his aunts — Irma and Margaret — were identified as Black. However, in 1920, after the family migrated to Chicago and had the pope’s mother Mildred, that decade’s census reflected their race as white.
Like so many families fleeing the South at that time, they could have shifted their racial identity. Smothers called this a common “survival strategy” at the time.
“In that intervening period, they not only migrated from New Orleans to Chicago in the period between 1910 and 1912 but they also changed their racial identifiers, which is very common,” Jari Honora, a genealogist and family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, told ABC News. “Many families did this as a question of their livelihoods as an economic decision, they passed for white.”
ABC News also obtained photos of those grandparents from the local genealogists working on uncovering this lineage. The pope’s brother, John Prevost, recognized the photos and confirmed to ABC News that they depict their grandparents.
While John Prevost knew about his grandparents’ connection to Haiti and the family’s time in New Orleans, he told ABC News that their family never discussed racial matters.
Creoles in New Orleans have been a part of Louisiana history for almost as long as it has been a state and have contributed enormously to the culture of Louisiana. The word Creole commonly describes mixed-race people of color.
“To be, you know, Creole in Louisiana, to be a free person of color in New Orleans in that time really indicates that there was at some point an enslaved person that had to fight for their freedom,” Smothers said, though genealogists have yet to find direct evidence linking the pope’s ancestry to any enslaved individual.
In a statement released Thursday night, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell said “the City of New Orleans is a melting pot of different religions and beliefs. We are thrilled to welcome Pope Leo XIV, who embodies morality, unity, and inclusivity.”
Genealogists continue to dig into the pope’s records to find out more information about his ancestry. For now, it seems that Pope Leo is not only the first American pope, but he also represents the melting pot of backgrounds in the U.S.
“They were a Creole of color family — Creole indicating their cultural background that they are rooted in this place in Louisiana, which, of course, has its origins of the French and Spanish colony with a significant West African population. And of color indicating that they were a racial mix. They were a combination of all of those ethnic backgrounds,” Honora said.
Honora also pointed to the symbolic nature of the pope’s ancestry.
“The story, the trajectory does not surprise me. But the fact that a descendant of that family … is the pope, you know, really adds the element of surprise,” he said.
