Rooted Hearts: Discovering Your Family’s and Neighbor’s Roots

A Campus-Wide Immigration and Family History Initiative 

The Idea

Every student, faculty, and staff member at Villanova has a migration history. Rooted Hearts invites students, faculty, and staff to discover theirs — and in doing so, to build empathy, solidarity, and community with each other, and with migrants and refugees in the Greater Philadelphia region, nation and across the world today.

The project is primarily sponsored by the newly established Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration and inspired by Pope Leo XIV, whose family tree spans Sicilian immigrants, Louisiana Creole ancestors, French pioneers, Spanish Caribbean roots, as well as slaves and slave holders across 15 generations. His story is the inspiration for our Villanova-wide invitation: if you look closely enough, every family has crossed a border.  

We are happy to invite the entire Villanova University community to join us on this journey of discovery and shared border crossing, together.

In the words of Pope Leo XIV:

A litmus test for social justice today is the treatment of migrants, refugees and those forced to move due to poverty, violence, climate change and environmental disasters. The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity. Pope Francis urged us to see migrants not simply as a problem to be managed, but as a living image of the People of God on the move. They are people with dignity, resources and dreams, who have the right to be treated with respect and to ask to become active members of the societies that welcome them. Social justice in this area entails at least two complementary commitments. On the one hand, this means protecting the rightful hopes of those forced to leave by ensuring safe and legal routes, dignified conditions for receiving them, and genuine pathways to integration. On the other hand, it means promoting the right to remain in one’s homeland in peace and security by addressing the root causes that force people to migrate, including those linked to economic injustices and the climate crisis. When these rights are respected, migration can become an opportunity for encounter and mutual enrichment among peoples. 

Magnifica Humanitas, 81 (2026)
 

How It Works

1. Sign up! Accept the invitation to participate by registering your participation here: Link to come soon!

2. Schedule time to interview your family members. Conduct family history interviews of your family members and use the tool ancestry.com — available free to students, faculty and staff through Falvey Memorial Library’s digital subscriptions — to trace your family’s origins and migration routes. Alternatively, if you prefer, we invite you to research the history of Villanova University, or the Augustinians, or our surrounding neighborhoods and its intersection with migration stories and themes.

3. Get to know key tools. Attend a hands-on workshop by Falvey librarians, Jutta Seibert and Erica Hayes, on how to use the ancestry research databases and how to build a digital timeline of a family’s story, focusing on practical tools: digital genealogical templates, interactive maps, image hosting, etc.

4. Create a compelling poster. Use your creativity to create a visual presentation of your unique family migration story. Drop your completed poster off to the Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration, located on the 2nd Floor of Ortiz Hall, Cabrini campus. 

5. Get out the vote. When the posters are displayed encourage your friends and colleagues across the University to view them and to submit a vote for the most compelling poster presentations.
 

Rooted Hearts Timeline - Coming Soon!
 

Additional One-Credit Course Opportunity

Rooted Hearts is also offering a one-credit ASPD course, taught by Dr. Gina Talley, Villanova History Professor and Faculty Advisory to the Ellis Center, to coincide with the project. 

Course Description: ASPD 2039/TOP: Researching Your Family History

This course provides you the opportunity to develop your research and digital skills while discovering your family’s history. Guided by your instructor and several other Villanova professionals in a series of workshops, you will use ancestry.com to research your family’s past and learn how to build a digital timeline and interactive map of a family’s story. 

Course registration details to come!

Rooted Hearts Primary Sponsor

Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration

Co-Sponsors

Falvey Library

The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest

Center for Irish Studies

Ethics Program

Latin American Studies Program

Department of History