Robert Prevost’s maternal grandparents were married near the French Quarter and later moved to Chicago, where his mother was born, records show.
Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the next pope, is partially descended from Creole people of color, according to Jari C. Honora, a noted genealogist and historian.
Mr. Honora works at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum in the French Quarter, and was a researcher on the TV show “Finding Your Roots” with the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Mr. Honora said in an interview that he found evidence that the new pope’s maternal grandparents were Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, of New Orleans. In a Facebook post, he displayed records of a marriage certificate with those two names.
He said he had also reviewed a photo of Martinez’s grave marker in Chicago, where their daughter — Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother — was born.
It’s unclear whether the new pope, who took the name Leo XIV, has ever addressed his ancestry in public, interviews or his writings.
The records show that couple married at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. Until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915, the church’s building was on Annette Street in the city’s Seventh Ward, a historic center of Louisiana’s Afro-Creole culture.
