New Pope has Creole roots in New Orleans, says Genealogist

Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago born in Chicago who was selected as the next Pope on Thursday, has been partially donated from Creools of Color, according to Jari C. Honora, a well -known genealog and historian.

Mr. Honora works at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum in the French neighborhood, and was a researcher in the TV program “Find Your Roots” with the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Mr. Honora said in an interview that he found evidence that the grandparents of the new Pope Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, from New Orleans. In one Facebook messageHe showed data from a marriage certificate with those two names.

He said he had also rated a photo of Martinez’s serious marker in Chicago, where their daughter – Mildred Martinez, the mother of the pope – was born.

The records show that the couple married in New Orleans in our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915, the building of the church in Annette Street was in the seventh department of the city, a historic center of the Afro-Creole culture of Louisiana.

The word “Creools” has several meanings in a Louisiana context. It can refer to people of European descent born in America. But it also often refers to mixed racing people in color.

Many of these Louisianians were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as ‘Gens de Couleur Libres’ or free people of color. Many were well trained, French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

In the course of the decades they established a foot in the business world, the building trade and the art, in particular music, with important contributions to the development of jazz. They remain an important strict in the famous heterogeneous culture of the city.

Lolita Villavasso Cherrie, a co-founder at Mr. Honora van The Creole Genealogical and Historical Associationsaid that the research seemed to signal a huge moment for the history of Louisiana Creolen, as a branch of the Pope’s family tree indeed withdrew to New Orleans.

“It would be so fantastic to have someone who has a bond with our people who give us the recognition we deserve,” said Mrs. Villavasso Cherrie, 79, a retired teacher. “I hate to say it, but we feel, many of us that our history was hidden from us.”

That is partly, she said, because many Creoles have been ‘successful’ as white over the years. It was only with the arrival of the internet, she said that many people started investigating their family history and became aware of their Creole roots.

Mrs. Villavasso Cherrie noted that in the 20th century a considerable number of Louisiana Creolen migrated to the Chicago And California.