New guide helps families trace Catholic nuns in their history

A new Genealogical.com book aims to help families, genealogists and historians find Catholic nuns and sisters who served in U.S. communities or appear on family trees. The guide explains how to locate orders, archives and records that can recover stories scattered across generations. Why it matters: - Catholic women religious played major roles in the United States’ humanitarian, educational and social services infrastructure. - An estimated 350,000 Catholic women religious served in the U.S. between 1790 and 1990. - Their histories are often hard to trace because records are scattered, names changed after entering religious life and many sisters moved frequently. - Families, students and local communities can lose personal history when those stories fade from memory. What happened: - Genealogical.com released Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the U.S. - The book is written by nationally recognized researcher Sunny Jane Morton. - The guide is designed to help readers locate Catholic nuns and sisters in the United States. - The release was announced in Baltimore on June 16, 2026. The details: - The book offers a roadmap for researching Catholic women religious in the U.S. - Readers learn why women religious can be elusive in historical records. - The guide explains how to identify a woman’s religious order and find its archives. - The book points readers to historical and genealogical records kept in those archives. - The guide also shows how to find women religious in censuses and other outside records. - Readers can use the book to locate people connected to the sisters, including students and other community members. - The book includes research case studies prepared by experts. - The guide is available from Genealogical.com. Between the lines: - The book fills a niche for genealogists trying to solve family-tree gaps created when women entered convent life. - The example of “great-great-aunt Silvia” underscores how easily a family link can disappear once a woman takes a religious name and leaves ordinary public records. - The project also reframes nuns and sisters as part of broader local history, not just church history. What’s next: - Genealogical.com is directing questions about the book and its author to Marketing Director Joe Garonzik at jgaronzi@genealogical.com or 410-804-1558. - The company is also promoting the release on its social media page . - Readers interested in tracing sisters in their own families or communities can use the guide as a starting point for archival research. The bottom line: - Searching for Sisters turns a difficult, often overlooked research problem into a practical how-to for finding Catholic nuns in family, school and community histories.