The power of reckoning: How Catholic Church records can help African Americans uncover their ancestry

The intersection of the Catholic Church with the transatlantic slave trade is extensive, and the investigation of its history and effects has grown to include a number of organizations in recent years, especially in the United States.

What many don’t know is the connection with the state of Kentucky, where many African Americans and their Catholic enslavers—including bishops, priests, and women religious—arrived in the 18th century from coastal regions like Maryland. Reckoning, Inc., an organization led by award-winning radio journalist Dan Gediman, aims to make this history known.

The six-year-old organization, which catalogs sacramental, genealogical, military, land, and oral records, represents a unique motherlode of data that Gediman says can help people today connect with the past.

“It's an extremely practical way to go looking for ancestors in a way that you can't if you just had an Ancestry.com account… because they don't have our records,” said Gediman, who spoke with BCM about his work, which includes many rare religious finds.

“The Church records, the Black ancestor database we have, these are proprietary to our website. They don't exist on Ancestry.com. They don't exist on FamilySearch. They don't exist on MyHeritage or any of the other online genealogical sites, though we have talked to many of them.”

Reckoning’s searchable database is the fruit of years of research, involving digitization of thousands of paper records in the public domain, as well as collaboration organizations willing to share their data. Though Gediman is currently the only full-time staffer, he has previously worked with other researchers and currently partners with contractors and volunteers.

The organization has had the financial support of various foundations and religious communities, including two that participated in the early era of Kentucky enslavement—the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth and the Sisters of Loretto.

They, along with bishops like Benedict Joseph Flaget and Martin John Spalding of Bardstown and Edward Fenwick of Cincinnati, as well as pioneering parish priests like Stephen Badin and Loretto founder Charles Nerinckx, owned African Americans who helped build institutions in Kentucky and across the American frontier.

The state itself stands as a largely hidden Catholic historical landmark, with its “Kentucky Holy Land” region attracting tourists and pilgrims who may not know the connections to slavery. Many African Americans, Catholic or otherwise, likewise do not know that their own families may have roots in the Bluegrass State.

“Nobody is actually from Mississippi, right? The cotton plantations there don't come online until the early 1800s and really don't get going until like the 1830s or 1840s, so to say you're from Mississippi doesn't give you much to go on,” said Gediman, who notes that most enslaved people were sold downriver only after they or their ancestors were brought to America via the East Coast and Upper South.

“Kentucky is just a useful kind of Swiss Army knife for Black genealogy. It gives you many different ways of getting at information.”

Gediman sees Reckoning as one way African Americans can get past the “wall of 1870”—the year of the first U.S. Census following the Emancipation Proclamation. Prior to that, enslaved people were not listed by name in government records and are difficult to pinpoint without external data or personal knowledge. 

With sacramental records like marriage and baptism registers, which typically have not been publicly accessible, one can potentially make a breakthrough and trace ancestors as far back as the end of the Middle Passage. To that end, Gediman says partnerships between Reckoning and other ancestry databases (like American Ancestors and FamilySearch) are in the works.

“Everything we've done in Kentucky, just about, could be done in Missouri, could be done in Maryland… It could also be done in Louisiana,” he said.

“Those are the four biggest seats of Catholicism in America in the antebellum era, and all four of them have mostly the same kinds of records we do.”

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

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