An article published by the New York Times in the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s election caused waves in Malta, after it suggested that his great-grandfather may have been Maltese.
The prospect of a Pope with Maltese roots, albeit ones that date back several generations, was met with surprise and joy in equal measure, quickly spreading across social media and the printed press.
But the genealogist who traced Robert Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV)’s roots says that although this would make for “an incredible story”, it is almost certainly untrue.
What do we know about the Pope’s family?
The New York Times report uses public records and the work of New Orleans-based genealogist Jari Honora to trace Pope Leo’s roots back to the Creole communities of New Orleans, following the family’s journey towards Chicago, where Robert Prevost was born in 1955.
Honora’s work shows a complex family history, with different official documents suggesting possible links to several countries, including Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the US.
Robert Prevost’s great-grandfather, Jacques Martinez, is first listed in the 1870 census of Louisiana, together with his wife Marie and four children, including their youngest child, then six-year-old Joseph Narval Martinez, who would later become Pope Leo’s grandfather.
The census lists all family members as born in Louisiana.
Joseph Narval Martinez would go on to marry Louise Baquié (the Pope’s grandmother) in 1887, listing himself as a native of Haiti on their marriage certificate.
The couple would go on to have several children, including a daughter, Mildred, who would become Robert Prevost’s mother.
Shortly before Mildred was born in 1912, the family relocated from New Orleans to Chicago, where Robert Prevost would eventually be born.
So what’s the Malta connection?
The New York Times report unearthed a 1910 census of Louisiana, which lists Joseph Narval Martinez and his wife Louise, Robert’s grandparents, together with six of their daughters.
Mildred, Robert’s mother, is not listed because she had not yet been born.
The census lists Joseph’s place of birth as Santo Domingo (the capital of the Dominican Republic) and the place of birth of his father, Jacques, as “Maltese” and that of his mother as “Spanish”.
But the census contains several anomalies.
For a start, it misspells the family name, listing it as “Martina,” rather than Martinez.
And the entries for several of his daughters also appear to list “Maltese” as their father’s birthplace, despite the same census listing Joseph’s place of birth as Santo Domingo.
A window into complex race relations
Speaking to Times of Malta, Honora pointed to several possible reasons for these anomalies, from simple administrative errors and misunderstandings to the “not uncommon” practice of people deliberately rewriting their family history.
He had previously told CBS News that the census listing is “not correct”.
Honora says listing the family’s heritage as Maltese could hint at the complex race relations of the time.
The Martinez family was always considered to be a Black family, rooted in the Creole Louisiana communities, typically mixed-race descendants of French and Spanish settlers in the region.
Throughout the 19th Century, the Martinez family’s ethnicity was always listed as Black on official documents, including in the 1900 census.
The 1910 census, which features the reference to Malta, is the first known time in which the family is described as white.
This census was published around the time the family were making their move up north, eventually settling in Chicago.
“In New Orleans they were considered Black, but when they moved to Chicago they passed as white,” Honora says.
“In the process of passing as white, people would frequently cite Mediterranean ancestry as a way to explain their skin colour”, Honora says, even if this ancestry is not quite accurate.
Scholars have argued that Creole communities historically engaged in complex forms of racial self-identification, pointing to their European or Mediterranean ancestry as a way to escape the straightjacket of the white/Black racial divide in the US South at the time.
Honora suggests it is possible that Joseph Narval Martinez could have made reference to Malta for this purpose.
There could also be simpler explanations, Honora says, such as a reference to ‘mulatto’ (a person with mixed Black and white ancestry) being misunderstood as “Maltese”.
However, having traced the family’s history back several generations, Honora says there are no indications of any connections to Malta whatsoever.
Honora, a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, has spent the days since Pope Leo’s election sifting through family records and state archives to get to the bottom of the Pope’s ancestry.
“We’ve traced links back to other European cities, including Prague, but not Malta,” Honora concluded.
Verdict
Although a 1910 Louisiana census lists the birthplace of Pope Leo’s great-grandfather as “Maltese,” the leading genealogist who traced the family’s history says this is incorrect.
Jari Honora, who has spent the days since the Pope’s election tracing his family history, says that no credible family connections to Malta have been uncovered.
The census listing could shed light on the complex racial relations of the time, with the family, which was previously listed as Black, coming to pass as white as it relocated from New Orleans to Chicago.
It was “not uncommon” for families in that situation to (sometimes inaccurately) make reference to Mediterranean ancestry as a way of explaining their ethnicity.
This claim is therefore false, as the evidence clearly refutes the claim.
Pope Leo XIV greeting crowds shortly after his election last week. Photo: Shutterstock
Copyright 2025 Times of Malta. All rights reserved.
Originally published here.
