Pope Leo XVI's New Orleans Creole lineage has city buzzing with excitement

America's most European city is buzzing over the news that the Catholic Church's new pope is not only from the U.S. but also has Haitian and Creole ancestors from New Orleans.

While Pope Leo XIV was born in Chicago, Illinois, records show that his family lineage has deep roots in Louisiana. When his maternal great-grandmother was just a baby, she was baptized in 1840 at the city's iconic St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, the New Orleans Archdiocese said. 

A couple of decades later, the pope's maternal great-grandparents — Ferdinand D. Baquie and Eugenie Grambois — married on Sept. 19, 1864, in New Orleans' St. Mary's Church on Chartres Street, according to the New Orleans Archdiocese's sacramental records.