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Review of “Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States”
by John D. Beatty, CG, FASG
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Religious sisterhoods, orders, and communities have existed since the Middle Ages and are associated primarily with Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism. The nuns and monks within these orders practice celibacy, and they also keep rich, detailed records that can be useful to family historians, even if the members of these orders do not themselves have descendants. These records have not been explored extensively in genealogical literature, but they deserve the attention of researchers for the unique clues about families they can provide.

A much-needed new guidebook on this topic is “Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States” by Sunny Jane Morton (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2026). The Genealogy Center’s copy is on order and forthcoming. Morton has burnished her credentials as an authority on religious records with the 2019 publication of “How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide,” which she co-authored with Harold Henderson (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2019), GC 929 M846h. The same useful insights the authors brought to that work continue in this new study.

With a focus exclusively on the Catholic Church, Morton opens with a review of the types of records and people found in the records of these orders. An estimated 350,000 nuns and sisters have served within religious communities in the United States. They staffed schools, administered hospitals, tended the wounded in war, and treated victims of epidemics. In a society dominated by Protestants and men, these women became barely visible in the historical record, taking vows and often moving far from their family homes as part of religious communities. Accordingly, they removed themselves from the contexts of their own families, sometimes appearing in genealogies as children with unknown futures or death dates. However, they did not actually disappear. The religious orders they joined often maintained detailed records about these women, their parents, siblings, and extended families. The nuns also ran schools, hospitals, and orphanages that maintained detailed records of children, patients, inmates, enslaved people, clients, employees, and donors, all of which can be genealogically valuable.

As a way of background, Morton discusses the various “rules” or traditions that these communities have followed and offers a brief history of nuns and religious life in the U.S. For those unfamiliar with these traditions, her explanation of the process of how women came to accept religious vows, their use of post nominals, and the migrations they often undertook in such service provide important context for genealogists. She covers such sources as Catholic directories and almanacs, guides to Sisterhoods, and the process of finding the archives of these orders. Many of these repositories remain closed to visitors, so researchers should attempt to contact the record custodians beforehand about access. Types of sources can often include personnel files, death and burial registers, personal photographs, scrapbooks, and correspondence from the nuns. Other records may also exist of orphans, students, hospital patients, and others associated with the places these nuns administered. Morton also includes also a chapter on finding nuns in civil vital records, census records, newspapers, local histories, and cemetery records. With nuns often taking new names after taking their vows, they can prove challenging to find. Morton concludes the book by offering several case studies and an appendix with a directory of selected archives.

Genealogists with Catholic relatives will find this book an important resource. It will expand their understanding of the range of available sources for researching family members. For example, the biography of a nun may include a birthplace that will open the pathway to a place of origin in Europe, thereby unlocking other family records. This book is an important source for Catholic researchers.

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The full 700,000-household census is now freely available for research. You can query by name, county, or townland at NationalArchives.ie.