Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States

2026-04-14T12:45:45-04:00

Vendor: GPC
Type: Book
Price: 29.95

Who were the Catholic nuns on your family tree or in your community? Most families know precious little about the women on their family trees who joined religious life. Historians, too, have largely overlooked the estimated 350,000 Catholic women religious (nuns and sisters) in the United States between 1790 and 1990. This despite their enormous collective contributions to the nation’s humanitarian, educational, and social services infrastructure.

Instead, the stories of nuns and sisters are largely forgotten, hidden in scattered archives, obscured by name changes and frequent relocations, fading from family and community memory with each passing generation. Searching for Sisters is your guide to finding them.

Nationally recognized genealogy expert Sunny Jane Morton provides this roadmap for researching Catholic women religious in the United States. You’ll learn:

Why they can be so elusive

How to identify a woman’s religious order and locate its archives

What rich historical and genealogical records may be in the archives

The path and terminology of religious life

How to find women religious in other kinds of records (censuses, etc.)

How to find other people (students, etc.) in records kept by women religious

About complicated institutional legacies, such as enslavement and Native American boarding schools

This guide is illustrated with sample documents; indexed; and enriched with detailed case studies by Morton and Megan Smolenyak, Margaret M. McMahon, PhD., and Matthew Cross, MLS.

Use this book to discover more about the women who devoted their lives in this unique kind of service. Or use this book to learn more about the students, communities, or other populations associated with the sisters. Their stories are all worth telling. This book shows you how to find them.

Sunny Jane Morton

2026, 6" x 9", paper, index, 134 pp.

ISBN: 9780806322117

102-3912