The First Baptist Church in Bardstown welcomed community members Thursday evening for a Juneteenth special presentation titled The Reckoning: Facing the Legacy of Slavery in America. The event spotlighted the work of Reckoning, Inc., an initiative confronting Kentucky’s role in slavery through research and storytelling. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth co-sponsored the evening and were represented by several SCNs at the event.
The program featured Dan Gediman, executive director of Louisville-based Reckoning, Inc., who delivered a detailed talk on How to Use Catholic Church Records to Find Enslaved Ancestors. His presentation shared insights from the Enslaved Catholic Church Records Project, a partnership aimed at tracing enslaved individuals through sacramental records, including baptisms, marriages, and burials.
Dan Gediman speaks during Thursday’s presentation in Bardstown.
Gediman explained that many Catholic parishes, especially in Kentucky, meticulously documented the lives of enslaved individuals. These records often included names, familial relationships, and the names of enslavers. This makes Catholic archives a rare and valuable resource for descendants of enslaved people seeking to trace their genealogy. With more than 5,200 records digitized from 27 Catholic parishes across Kentucky, the project is a significant historical resource.
SCNs Brenda Gonzales, Theresa Knabel and Carmelita Dunn listen as Dan Gediman introduces a church records project that is helping families trace enslaved ancestors through parish baptism, marriage and burial documents.
The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth played a vital role in supporting this research, providing grants to help locate, digitize, and analyze records from parishes across Nelson, Marion, and Washington counties. These counties, Gediman noted, contain some of the most comprehensive records of enslaved persons in the U.S.
Due to the subtle ways enslaved people were referenced, (e.g., “Ignatius of Mrs. Ritchie”) and variations of names or legal name changes, identifying individuals required labor-intensive indexing. Research for the project began in 2018, and the records now form a searchable online database.
Gediman illustrated how descendants — particularly Black Catholics or those enslaved by Catholics — can break past the 1870 U.S. Census “brick wall” using this database. By tracing parish records and family naming patterns, families can reconstruct multi-generational family trees.
The project shows the Church’s complicated involvement in slavery. Enslaved individuals often received the sacraments, reflecting a paradox of spiritual inclusion amid systemic oppression. These records bear witness to that contradiction and now serve as a tool for truth and reconciliation.
The Enslaved Catholic Church Records Project stems from broader work conducted by The Reckoning: Facing the Legacy of Slavery in Kentucky, a podcast and multimedia series produced by Gediman. Through extensive research and interviews, the series examines how slavery shaped Kentucky’s economy, institutions, and families. The initiative seeks to uplift descendants’ voices while compelling institutions — including religious communities — to account for their roles.
“The whole purpose of our organization is to learn as much as we can about slavery, especially in Kentucky, but really all over the country, and to gather as many available archival documents and put them in one place, online,” Gediman said Thursday.
More information is available at reckoningradio.org, including episode archives and tools for genealogical research.
Following Gediman’s presentation, the evening continued with a Juneteenth celebration of faith and culture. Music, spoken word, and communal prayer touched on themes of freedom, remembrance, systemic racism and social justice.
Juneteenth, short for June Nineteenth, commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In 2021, Juneteenth was designated as a federal holiday. Thursday’s event was the fourth formal Juneteenth celebration hosted in Bardstown.