While you might hope to glimpse your great-great-grandfather’s baptismal certificate, the confirmation record of a distant cousin or the sacramental marriage certificate of your long-forgotten ancestors, the Catholic Church generally does not supply them. 

Father John Antony, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Fort Smith and a canon lawyer, said sacramental records are confidential. They are typically only requested by the subject of the record or a guardian if they are minors. 

“We don’t make those registries available for genealogists. That’s not the purpose for them. The purpose for them is sacramental and spiritual. It’s great people investigate their family histories … but that’s not typically what we’re holding sacramental registries for,” he said. “You have been changed forever when you are baptized. … Because a person’s baptism is so crucial, we’re very, very careful.” 

All sacramental records — baptism, confirmation, holy orders, marriage — or if an annulment is approved, are notated on the back of a baptismal certificate at the parish where the person was baptized. Father Antony said it is typically the pastor’s responsibility to contact the pastor at the church of the person’s baptism to update those records. 

“The records are in a sealed vault. Every church should ideally keep their registries in a fireproof room,” Father Antony said, adding that his parish has a room of metal interior walls that few people can access. 

If you love family stories and history, building a family tree can be an interesting hobby or family activity that can bring different generations together.

How to get started

• Buy a family tree book, download a pedigree or ancestor chart from the internet or join a genealogy site. Some sites will have a monthly or annual fee, but others, like familysearch.org, run by the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are free. You might prefer a hardcover book if you want to pass it down to your children and grandchildren.
• Input names and dates like birthdate, marriage date and date of death for family members you know. Thanks to technology, if you have an account with a genealogy site, it will recommend names and dates you didn’t know, like where your great-great-great-great-grandparents were born or how many children they had. The benefit of an online account is that other users will share photos of the person or their gravestone. Government records like birth certificates, census records, draft cards and newspaper clippings can be attached to the person’s record, too. It provides more interesting details and stories for you to explore.
• You can add family group sheets to your tree listing names and ages of all the children of your grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., that aren’t on your family tree.

Tips

• Be careful with the spelling of first and last names. It was more common in the past for last names to change. For example, my maiden name, Walters, used to be Walter when the family lived in Alsace, France, in the 1870s.
• For women, record their information under their maiden name, not their married name.
• Be careful with looking further down your tree if your relatives got divorced. It might be the second wife that was your great-great-great-grandmother, not the first. Your online chart might be directed in the wrong direction.
• For Catholic relatives or relatives who were members of the clergy, it might be interesting to explore more of their religious devotion, like when and where they got baptized, received First Communion or were ordained in a Protestant denomination.  
• Be careful when writing down dates and places of births and deaths. As you go 300 or 400 years back, it is harder to find consistent sources for the same information.
• Talk to family members who have an interest in genealogy. If your grandparents or great-grandparents are alive, start with them. This is a time you can gather stories or other interesting facts like where they worked or attended church that genealogy sites probably won’t mention. They might have new names and dates you can add, or they can at least verify what you have found.

–          Malea Hargett

In 1923, Michael John Connell left for the United States from a small town near Knock in west Ireland to escape poverty. He came to the port of Philadelphia July 4. Connell built a life, working in landscaping and gardening, marrying fellow Irish immigrant Agnes Walsh and had three sons. 

He did not talk about his life in Ireland, instead focusing on the future that, by God’s grace and hard work, he had created for his family. 

In 2024, his grandson, Father John Connell, 67, diocesan vicar general and moderator of the curia, was standing on the same ground his grandfather had left 101 years prior. 

“I wanted to look at the landscapes. When I went to Kiltimagh, I looked around and I knew the landscape didn’t change. A mountain will still be a mountain 100 years later. It was all flat marshlands. I was thinking about how my grandparents lived in this area, the struggles they would have had. There was literally nothing there.” 

Father Connell’s journey to his family’s home country is one example of how Catholics in Arkansas are sharing how genealogy — the study of family history — has helped them draw closer to God, connect with relatives and better understand the plight of today’s immigrants.

Passion for heritage 

For Libby Olivi Borgognoni, 89, a lifelong member of Our Lady of the Lake Church in Lake Village, researching her family history is more than a hobby — it’s a passion. The parish historian has spent her life immersed in her Italian heritage, compelled to share the story of immigrants who labored at the Sunnyside and Red Leaf Plantations beginning in 1895.

While Italian immigrants, including Borgognoni’s grandparents, were promised prosperity in America, they quickly were welcomed with poverty and hard labor in Arkansas. As a child, Borgognoni said, “I lived the Italian life” — meaning she picked and chopped cotton, had no running water or electricity until her teenage years and lived off the land. 

“We had nothing. We did everything we needed to do,” she said. “… We were in the fields all the time. When the sun came up and when the moon came up, we were still in the fields.”

However, the consistent thread that held the family together was their Catholic faith. 

“Family was everything. Prayer and believing in the Lord and going to church every time the doors were open whether or not you had to walk plugging through mud on the gravel road,” she said. 

She married her late husband Tony in 1956, igniting the spark to learn more about their Italian ancestry. Since 1969, she has steadfastly researched her family’s heritage and all the Italian families who founded the colony near the southern tip of Lake Chicot near Lake Village. She wrote the “Italians of Sunnyside” book in 1995, and a second edition was released last year with the help of her son, Dr. Anthony Borgognoni, including more than 300 pages celebrating more than 2,000 Italians and their families who immigrated to the area. Filmmaker Larry Foley created a two-hour PBS documentary, “Cries from the Cottonfield,” inspired by the book. 

Borgognoni visited Italy three times, the first in 1985. Her travels and research also spurred a second book called “Memories,” tracing her and her husband’s family’s lineage. 

“In Italy, I researched courthouse records of mine and (my) husband’s families, church records dating back 700 years, stayed at homes of our relatives and wrote down everything back to nine generations on my side and 16 generations were found on my husband’s grandmother’s side,” she said. “I stayed at the home of a priest, Mama’s relative, for several days who took us all over Italy to all our relatives’ homes, cemeteries and churches.” 

Borgognoni said in-depth genealogy is a commitment, and those starting out must be curious and willing to learn. 

“You just got to be embedded and wanting to know. You have to call, search and visit people,” she said. 

Most importantly, it’s strengthened her love for the Lord. 

“It’s important to know because it all goes back to the Lord in my mind,” she said. “He knew us before he created us; he knew what we’d be about, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do. There’s countless relatives of mine all over the world. I just feel like everybody needs to know where they came from, where they came to and how their lives impacted other people and what they did with their lives.” 

Here and now 

While many might research their past, visiting their place of origin and connecting to the present can be a fulfilling piece of genealogy. 

Father Connell, who is also pastor of St. Joseph Church and minister to Catholic Campus Ministry in Conway, grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the oldest of five children. He visited his Irish grandparents every Saturday. 

“Even as a small child, I knew the importance of lineage. My grandparents never talked about Ireland. They were so poor, they didn’t share anything. They came to make a better life for themselves and their children,” he said. “What I learned from that was my grandparents were an example of why people migrate — they migrate to make their lives better. They were very productive members of society.”

From Sept. 11-20, 2024, he took his first trip to Ireland as the spiritual leader for the Arkansas Catholic pilgrimage. Father Connell visited Cuiltybo and the strip of land where his grandfather was likely born. He got to see Mayo Abbey, where his grandparents were baptized (though the church was closed), and the one-room schoolhouse where they were taught. A highlight was meeting seven distant cousins and spending the day touring the area with three of them. 

“When I met them and talked to them and listened to their stories, I knew we were related. It was a weird feeling. There’s a characteristic, but I couldn’t pinpoint what the characteristic was. … I just knew these people were related to me. There was no doubt in my mind.” 

It was a similar feeling Paul Antony, parishioner of St. Raphael Church and brother of Father John Antony, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Fort Smith, had when he met his relatives in India — about 50 of them. Tracking his genealogy all started with writing down names.  

“It was a piece of paper and a pencil. When I went to India one time, I was sitting there and realized I didn’t know 90 percent of the people coming to visit us. So I just started writing names down,” the now 57-year-old said of a trip to India with his family when he was about 18. “My uncle would say, ‘He’s related to this person,’ and I started drawing it out in a tree.” 

Suddenly, his extended family began to take shape, and it continued to change his life. 

Antony, married with three children, emigrated to the U.S. with his two younger siblings and parents when he was 9 years old in 1976. The family soon moved to Little Rock from Texas and connected with about eight other Indian families who spoke Malayalam, the native language of the State of Kerala. 

Antony said his middle name was the primary connection to his heritage — Konuparampil. His brother, sister and father have the same middle name. 

“In India our names not only connect our families, but it connects the location of where our family is from,” he said. His parents are from the state of Kerala, in southern India. “Konuparampil references a ‘Corner of the Mountain.’”  

When he began working for Walmart in the mid-2000s to help create a software development site in India, he traveled for work about once or twice a year, staying with relatives, learning more about his family and connecting with them via social media and texting through WhatsApp. 

“I thought, wait, there’s a lot of people all over the world and in India that my family never talked about. I got to get to know these people. I’ve always wanted to have that, a broader family set. It always existed; I just didn’t know about it,” he said. 

Antony said there’s a tremendous amount of diversity in his family, and their devotion to their Catholic faith varies, much like families in the U.S. One highlight was being a part of his cousin Lovy’s wedding in 2023, while Father Antony was the celebrant. Father Antony was also there for Lovy’s First Communion in 2003. 

He admits he didn’t go “up” his family tree but across the branches to connect to those still here. 

“Everything is tied back to the family. It wasn’t just the five of us. No, it’s much bigger,” Paul Antony said. “I think that’s really important in the Catholic faith.” 

(Photo info: The icon, Tree of Jesse, by created by Victor of Crete in 1674. (Wikimedia Commons))

Understanding Jesus’ biblical account of his human ancestry can help draw us closer to the universality of our Church and each other. 

Two genealogies in the New Testament trace Jesus’ human history, connecting him to the divine: Matthew 1 and Luke 3:23-38. 

Father John Antony, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Fort Smith, explained that both Gospel readings serve unique purposes. In Matthew’s Gospel, he begins by listing names “unfamiliar to most people,” he said, linking Abraham, the father of Judaism, to Jesus. 

Luke begins with the infancy narratives of Jesus and St. John the Baptist before tracing Jesus back to Adam, the father of all humanity, and ultimately God. 

“It’s trying to show Jesus is here for everybody. Jesus came to save the whole human race. That’s really emphasized by the Gospel of Luke because he’s trying to show that Jesus descended from Adam and that Jesus is the new Adam. Just like we all came from one man, Adam, and we’re all fallen because of his sin, this new Adam is going to touch all of us and save us with his grace,” Father Antony said. “One reason to pay attention to who Jesus is connected to in the genealogy, whether Abraham or Adam, has an impact on all of us. Just like Adam’s sin impacts all of us, Jesus’ saving grace impacts all of us.” 

In Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, Father Antony said there are “some unsavory characters,” whether it’s the mention of how “David became father of Solomon, whose mother (Bathsheba) had been the wife of Uriah” — worded in a way that emphasizes he was born out of an affair — or the mention of Rahab, a prostitute. 

“I think what that part of the genealogy is trying to say is that all families have black sheep in them, and that’s OK because God can still work through that,” Father Antony said. “He can write straight with crooked lines. As we look at our own genealogy, we don’t have to whitewash our own unsavory characters because Jesus didn’t.” 

Matthew’s genealogy is the Gospel read in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, the first within the four Christmas Masses. According to a 2021 article by theology professor John Bergsma published by the St. Paul Center, the Gospel immediately establishes Jesus’ right to the throne and fulfillment of the prophecies in the Old Testament. Father Antony said it’s like a “runway” to move forward from the past and into the new future that Jesus’ birth brings. 

“To understand who Jesus is you have to know where he came from, who he came from” in his humanity, he said. “Genealogy is not just a question of who are my ancestors, but who am I, implicitly. Same for Jesus — who did he come from? They are a part of his DNA, part of the makeup of his human nature. That’s why acknowledging our past makes a difference. So too with Jesus.” 

While the world is more connected than ever on the surface, particularly with social media, the shallow connections often have us yearning for something deeper, Father Antony explained. 

“Getting in touch with your family history and families getting to know their story helps you discover your own story,” he said. “… I think genealogy puts people on the right track to solve this mystery, which is me. I’m the mystery I’m trying to solve. You have this breadcrumb of clues you resolve or solve a little bit of the mystery. That also goes back to the genealogy of Jesus, the greatest mystery.” 

Are sacramental records public? 

While you might hope to glimpse your great-great-grandfather’s baptismal certificate, the confirmation record of a distant cousin or the sacramental marriage certificate of your long-forgotten ancestors, the Catholic Church generally does not supply them. 

Father John Antony, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Fort Smith and a canon lawyer, said sacramental records are confidential. They are typically only requested by the subject of the record or a guardian if they are minors. 

“We don’t make those registries available for genealogists. That’s not the purpose for them. The purpose for them is sacramental and spiritual. It’s great people investigate their family histories … but that’s not typically what we’re holding sacramental registries for,” he said. “You have been changed forever when you are baptized. … Because a person’s baptism is so crucial, we’re very, very careful.” 

All sacramental records — baptism, confirmation, holy orders, marriage — or if an annulment is approved, are notated on the back of a baptismal certificate at the parish where the person was baptized. Father Antony said it is typically the pastor’s responsibility to contact the pastor at the church of the person’s baptism to update those records. 

“The records are in a sealed vault. Every church should ideally keep their registries in a fireproof room,” Father Antony said, adding that his parish has a room of metal interior walls that few people can access.