Searching for Sisters
A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States
By Sunny Jane Morton
$29.95 Print Edition
Who were the Catholic nuns on your family tree or in your community?
Their stories are all worth telling. This book shows you how to find them.
- Stop guessing and start finding the right community. This guide walks you through how to confirm she became a sister/nun and how to identify the exact institute/order—even when names, habits, and locations changed over time.
- Get to the records that actually hold the answers. You’ll learn how to locate the correct archives (often not digitized or easy to search) and what to ask for once you find them.
- Know what “good records” look like for women religious. The book breaks down what’s typically in convent/archival collections—profession details, assignments, correspondence, community history, and more—so you can target your search with precision.
- Use “outside” sources to fill the gaps. It shows how to track sisters in civil records and other overlooked places (vitals, census, cemeteries, newspapers, city directories, Social Security records, local histories, and select international resources).
- Learn by example, not theory. Multiple real-world case studies demonstrate how these strategies work in practice—plus a curated appendix of selected archives to speed up your next steps.
What’s Inside?
Most families know precious little about the women on their family trees who joined religious life. Historians, too, have largely overlooked the contributions of Catholic women religious (nuns and sisters) to U.S. history, despite their enormous collective impact on 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
Sunny Jane Morton
Sunny Jane Morton is a genealogy educator whose expertise includes using U.S. religious denominational records for family history. She is co-author of How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, which received a book award from the National Genealogical Society (NGS). She is Editor of NGS Magazine; a Contributing Editor at Family Tree Magazine; and an Associate member of the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious. Research for this book was supported in part by a Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholics at the University of Notre Dame.
Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States
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.