What links celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber and Jack Kerouac to Pope Leone XIV? A common ancestor: Louis Boucher de Grandpré, Canadian born in 1590 in Quebec.
The discovery was made by genealogist Henry Louis Gates, a reference in the study of family trees in the United States.
Gates, who has hosted the program for 13 years “Finding Your Roots”, mapped more than a hundred ancestors of the first American-born Pope. The data was published in the newspaper New York Times. The research also involved the American Ancestors and Cuban Genealogy Club, from Miami.
In all, 15 generations of ancestors were traced, with 40 French, 24 Italian and 21 Spanish. The genealogical branches range from XNUMXth-century Spanish nobles to Sicilian peasants. Enslaved African-Americans and, in some cases, slave owners were also found.
On his mother's side, his origins date back to the city of Isla, in northern Spain, in 1573, with four members of the local minor nobility, the so-called hidalgos. Among his descendants is Antonio José de Sucre, hero of Latin American independence.
The paternal side has roots in Sicilia. The grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano, was born in Milazzo in 1876. He emigrated to the state of Illinois, in the United States, after the unification of Italy. His story includes a controversial marriage: after abandoning his wife, Salvatore lived with Suzanne Fontaine, a Frenchwoman, with whom he had two children. A 1917 newspaper reported the couple's arrest for bigamy. Even so, they raised their sons Jean and Louis, the latter father of Pope Leone XIV.
The French maternal family surname, Prévost, was adapted in the US to Prevost, without an accent. This branch, which lived in Canada in the 17th century, connects Leone XIV to other celebrities. Many of these ancestors migrated to New Orleans.
In this group, there are four white slave owners and at least eight African-Americans. Among them is Marie Jeanne, a “mulatto” slave of François Lemelle, with whom she had six children. After her partner’s death, she inherited and bought more slaves, totaling 20 by the end of her life.
“It may come as a surprise that African-Americans also owned slaves, although they were few in number,” Gates explains. For him, the Pope’s genealogy symbolizes the historical diversity of the United States and helps to understand its cosmopolitan worldview.
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