Sephardic Bnei Anusim forebear/s who was/were forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. In regards to the second issue, in Rabbinic Judaism, a person's Jewish status is determined in one of two ways: Thus, natural-born Jewish status of a child (male or female) comes from its mother, via its maternal grandmother, via its maternal great-grandmother, and so on. As a consequence of the number of generations that have passed since the forced conversion of the Anusim ancestors of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim, the likelihood of a broken direct maternal Jewish lineage in that time (or the difficulty in producing documentary evidence proving otherwise)
Sephardic law and customs a local custom. So far, then, it is meaningless to speak of "Sephardic custom": all that is meant is Jewish law without the particular customs of the Ashkenazim. For this reason, the law accepted by other non-Ashkenazi communities, such as the Italian and Yemenite Jews, is basically similar to that of the Sephardim. There are of course customs peculiar to particular countries or communities within the Sephardic world, such as Syria and Morocco. An important body of customs grew up in the Kabbalistic circle of Isaac Luria and his followers in Safed, and many of these have spread to communities