After his father died, Mark Charles Roudané, a retired Minnesota schoolteacher, began going through his dad’s papers. There were scores of binders, the records of a life as a prosperous, white, ...

I share an ancestral connection with Pope Leo XIV. What does that story say about race, religion, and ancestry in America?

When Father Tony Ricard watched the new pope deliver his first address to the faithful Thursday in St. Peter’s Square, he ...

After Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was elected pope, genealogists got to work. What they found surprised them.

In its earliest usage in colonial Louisiana, Creole — créole in French or criollo in Spanish — referred to any person born in the Americas of European or African ancestry. Over time ...

As part of the melting pot of French, Spanish, African and Native American cultures in Louisiana, the pope’s maternal ancestors would be considered Creole. “It was special for me because I ...

His ancestry, traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture, links Leo XIV to the rich and sometimes overlooked Black Catholic experience in America. By Richard Fausset and Robert ...

Louisiana Creoles are usually Catholic, often but not always with French or Spanish last names. And many are light-skinned; some are fair enough to be perceived as “only” white. The roots of ...