The maternal grandfather of 69-year-old Robert Prevost, the newly minted pope, was evidently born abroad in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, according to birth records that professional genealogist Chris Smothers cited to
ABC News in a recent report. When Leo’s grandfather, Joseph Martinez, obtained an 1887 marriage license to wed the future pope’s grandmother, Louise Baquié, he listed his birthplace as Haiti, which at the time was the same territory as Santo Domingo, Smothers noted.
Baquié’s birth records, meanwhile, indicate that she was born in Louisiana’s most prominent city,
New Orleans, to parents who were reportedly married at a local Catholic church.
Records from the 1900 census show that Joseph – apparently the son of a Louisianan – and Louise lived at a home in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a bastion for the city’s Creole people. The couple’s home later was among hundreds that were demolished to make way for a highway overpass linking New Orleans’s suburbs to its globally renowned French Quarter,
a move that drastically reduced the area’s population and economically devastated the scores of Black businesses that had been prevalent there.
Those same census records identified Leo’s maternal grandparents as Black. Two of his aunts were similarly identified, just about four years after the Plessy v Ferguson US supreme court case – which originated in New Orleans – upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in the country.
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