The forthcoming documentary CURRENT: A Descendant’s Journey for Truth explores how family history, archival research, faith, and public memory can recover stories long excluded from traditional accounts of American expansion. Among the institutions featured are the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, whose efforts to investigate and publicly acknowledge their historical connections with enslaved and African American people form an important part of the film.

Who Are the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth?

The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth are an international Catholic religious Congregation founded in Kentucky in 1812 by Mother Catherine Spalding and Bishop John Baptist David. Rooted in the spiritual tradition of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac, the Sisters have served for more than two centuries in education, health care, social services, pastoral ministry, and advocacy for justice.

Their motto, Caritas Christi Urget Nos — “The Love of Christ Impels Us” — expresses a spirituality in which faith must become concrete service. From their beginnings near Bardstown, Kentucky, the Congregation expanded throughout the United States and later established ministries in countries including India, Nepal, Belize, Botswana, and Kenya. Today, the Sisters and their Associates commit themselves to peace, ecological justice, and solidarity with oppressed and marginalized people.

Like many long-established religious and civic institutions in the United States, however, the Congregation also carries a history shaped by the racial structures of earlier centuries. In recent years, the Sisters have undertaken sustained work to research, preserve, and present that history with greater honesty.

It is this commitment that brought the filmmakers of CURRENT to Nazareth.

A Descendant’s Search for the “Whole Truth”

CURRENT: A Descendant’s Journey for Truth is produced by historian, educator, genealogist, and filmmaker Pam Smith and directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Loria King.

The documentary begins with Smith’s own family history. Its central ancestral figure is Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, Smith’s third great-grandmother, who was enslaved by members of Virginia’s Lewis family. According to the film project, Matilda was related biologically to Thomas Jefferson through his extended family and was only nine years old when the Lewis household moved west to Kentucky in 1808, taking 24 enslaved people with them.

By following Matilda’s life and forced migration, the film challenges familiar narratives of westward expansion. American history often describes this movement primarily through the experience of white settlers, explorers, and landowners. CURRENT places enslaved African Americans at the center of that history, asking what the westward movement meant for people who did not travel freely but were forcibly transported as property.

The documentary combines genealogy, oral history, archival records, archaeology, visits to ancestral sites, and interviews with historians, educators, librarians, faith leaders, students, artists, and descendants. Its guiding question is both historical and contemporary: Why does telling the whole truth about the past matter today?

The filmmakers connect this question with current debates over the teaching of Black history, the removal or restriction of books, the interpretation of historic sites, and the resistance sometimes encountered by educators who address slavery and its continuing consequences.

Three Geographical and Historical Journeys

The film has been envisioned in three major parts:

Part One: Virginia and the Creation of Historical Myths

The first section was filmed in Richmond, Charlottesville, Arlington, and other locations in Virginia. It examines the arrival and enslavement of Africans, the systems that sustained slavery, the resistance of enslaved communities, and the ways misleading historical narratives were created and preserved.

Rather than treating slavery only as an abstract political or economic system, the documentary seeks to restore the human experiences hidden behind records, buildings, landscapes, and family names.

Early versions of this part of the documentary have already been shown at libraries, museums, churches, historical organizations, and educational events. Screenings have often been accompanied by public discussions about genealogy, racial memory, historical responsibility, and healing.

Part Two: Kentucky and Forced Migration West

The second section follows Matilda and other enslaved people transported from Virginia to Kentucky. It explores the Ohio River and overland routes not simply as pathways of settlement, but also as routes of forced migration.

Filming in Kentucky brought Pam Smith and the production team to the motherhouse campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. The visit connected Smith’s broader research with another branch of her family history: her mixed-race ancestor Mary McCrosky, who attended school at Nazareth from 1856 until 1865.

Part Three: Sierra Leone and African Origins

A future section is planned in Sierra Leone, West Africa. It will explore Matilda’s African heritage and the continuing search among African American descendants for ancestral histories disrupted by enslavement.

In this way, the documentary’s geographical journey — from Africa to Virginia and then westward to Kentucky — mirrors a deeper journey from historical erasure toward identity, memory, and belonging.

Filming at Nazareth

Pam Smith visited the Nazareth campus in July 2024 with members of the film crew. During the visit, she interviewed Sister Theresa Knabel, SCN, who has been closely involved in researching and interpreting the Congregation’s history with African American and enslaved people.

Together, they visited several places that embody Nazareth’s effort to preserve and present this history.

At Heritage Hall, the filmmakers viewed the African American exhibit, historical objects, and photographs. Among the materials examined was a significant 1912 photograph showing formerly enslaved people gathered at Nazareth.

The team also visited the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Archival Center, where Smith studied documents and photographs relating both to African American history at Nazareth and to her ancestor Mary McCrosky.

The visit concluded at the Monument to the Enslaved in Nazareth Cemetery. The monument had recently been moved to a more prominent location, making the remembrance of those who were enslaved a more visible part of the campus and its sacred landscape.

These locations are not presented merely as historical attractions. Together, the exhibit, archives, cemetery, and memorial represent different dimensions of remembrance: learning the facts, preserving the evidence, naming those who were overlooked, and creating spaces in which grief, prayer, and reconciliation can take place.

Mary McCrosky and a Personal Connection to Nazareth

Pam Smith’s relationship with Nazareth began long before the documentary was filmed there.

She has spent approximately three decades researching her family history and identified Mary McCrosky in the course of that work. Mary’s father was white, while Mary herself was of mixed racial ancestry. Smith’s research suggests that her father privately acknowledged her but could not or would not do so publicly.

Mary’s attendance at the Nazareth school from 1856 to 1865 therefore raises complex questions about race, identity, education, family secrecy, and the social boundaries of the period. Smith recognizes that Mary received educational opportunities denied to many other African American children, but she also sees her story as evidence of the painful contradictions produced by slavery and racial hierarchy.

Smith has returned to Nazareth several times to conduct research, stay on the campus, and share her family’s history with the Sisters. Her participation in CURRENT therefore brings together both personal genealogy and institutional history.

Sister Theresa Knabel and the Ministry of Historical Honesty

Sister Theresa’s contribution to the documentary is important because the film does not portray Nazareth’s history as a finished story. Instead, it shows historical truth-telling as an ongoing responsibility.

Through archival research, exhibits, public presentations, memorials, and conversations with descendants, the Congregation has sought to bring previously overlooked people and experiences into the historical record.

Pam Smith has praised the Sisters’ willingness to face difficult parts of their past. During the 2024 visit, she described Nazareth as a possible model for other institutions because people there were prepared to examine uncomfortable evidence rather than avoid it.

Such work does not erase the past or resolve every unanswered question. It does, however, create the conditions for accountability, dialogue, and more truthful relationships between institutions and descendant communities.

Faith and Truth Are Not Enemies

One of the documentary’s most significant dimensions for Christian audiences is its refusal to treat faith and historical honesty as opposites.

Smith has spoken openly about the tension she experiences when confronting painful chapters in Church history while continuing to value the faith that sustained many of her ancestors. For her, truthful historical investigation need not destroy faith. On the contrary, faith can provide resources for perseverance, moral courage, healing, and reconciliation.

This perspective has particular resonance within the Vincentian tradition. Vincentian spirituality insists on looking directly at suffering and injustice rather than turning away. It also calls believers to listen to people whose dignity has been denied and to respond through concrete acts of justice and charity.

Historical truth-telling, from this perspective, is not simply an academic exercise. It becomes a form of service: restoring names, experiences, and human dignity to people who were reduced to property in official records or excluded from institutional narratives.

A Documentary for Education and Dialogue

The filmmakers envision CURRENT as a resource for much more than conventional film audiences. The project is being developed for use in:

• schools and teacher-training programs;
• libraries, museums, and historical societies;
• genealogical and family-history organizations;
• churches and faith communities;
• racial dialogue and restorative-justice initiatives;
• public-policy conversations;
• historic sites reconsidering how they interpret slavery;
• communities seeking healing through truthful remembrance.

The film has already generated discussion during presentations of its earlier Virginia section. The completed documentary is expected to offer a fuller account of the Kentucky interviews and the people and institutions involved, including the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.

In July 2026, Smith reported that she was continuing work on a rough cut, with the hope of presenting it for an initial screening later in the summer. She also explained that the newly released trailer includes only a selection of the interviews; the finished film will contain a broader and more developed narrative.

Post-production fundraising is also continuing, particularly for the completion of the Kentucky portion of the documentary.

Watch the Videos

Updated trailer for CURRENT: A Descendant’s Journey for Truth:

Black History Month screening and presentation of CURRENT:

Pam Smith visited Nazareth on July, 2024, as part of the ongoing documentary:

Remembering as an Act of Justice

The participation of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in CURRENT reflects a broader question facing religious communities, universities, churches, and other historic institutions: What should be done when archival evidence reveals painful or neglected parts of the past?

The documentary suggests that an honest response begins with listening — to records, to descendants, to local communities, and to the people whose experiences were excluded from official histories.

For the Vincentian Family, this work carries a recognizable spiritual meaning. To honor the dignity of people who were enslaved is to refuse their continued invisibility. To preserve their stories is to acknowledge that they were never marginal to history, even when historical narratives treated them as such.

CURRENT: A Descendant’s Journey for Truth is therefore more than a documentary about one family or one institution. It is an invitation to ask what histories we have inherited, whose voices remain unheard, and how truth can become a pathway toward justice, reconciliation, and healing.

With informations taken from https://nazareth.org/