FINDING THE POPE’S ROOTS

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami

New York Times Magazine

On May 8, moments after the world learned that an American cardinal named Robert Francis Prevost was becoming Pope Leo XIV, my inbox was flooded with emails. For the past 13 years, I’ve hosted a PBS show called “Finding Your Roots,” where, with the help of a team of genealogists, we trace the family history of prominent figures, often turning up fascinating details about their ancestors that they didn’t know they had. As soon as Prevost became one of the most eminent people in the world, fans of the show wanted to know what mysteries lay in his family’s past.

They didn’t have to wait long. Hours later, news broke: The New York Times, drawing on research by Jari C. Honora, a genealogist, revealed that Pope Leo had recent African American ancestors. Prevost’s maternal grandparents, residents of the Seventh Ward in New Orleans, were described in records as “mulatto” and “black.” This was earthshaking news, but we knew it was only the beginning.

The pope (bottom left) with his mother and two brothers outside Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears.

The initial finding about the pope’s Black ancestry looked back three generations. In collaboration with the genealogists at American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, we were able to identify more than 100 people going back 15 generations and discovered a wealth of fascinating stories. We all agreed that, after more than a decade of doing this kind of genealogical work, the pope’s roots make for one of the most diverse family trees we have ever created.

The farthest back we could go was to Spain in the 1500s on the pope’s mother’s side.

Four of his 11th-great-grandfathers are listed as “hidalgos” (“gentlemen,” or minor untitled nobility) in the 1573 census for Isla, a small town in northern Spain.

One of their grandchildren was Diego de Arana Valladar, a captain of land and sea in the Royal Armada who spent years fighting Dutch privateers trying to take over Portugal’s colonial holdings in America.

His son, Diego de Arana Isla, was 9 when his father died. He traveled the world in the Spanish military, first to Panama, where he served as captain of artillery.

Through Diego’s sister, the pope is related to Antonio José de Sucre, the hero of the Battle of Ayacucho, who played a crucial role in defeating Spanish colonialism in Latin America. (The tree shows only direct ancestors, so it excludes aunts, uncles and cousins.)

Antonio José de Sucre was the first constitutionally elected president of Bolivia and a close friend of Bolivar himself.

Diego settled in Cuba around 1663, as accountant for the royal treasury, and died there in 1684. The family remained in Cuba.

Four generations of his mother’s line were born in Havana.

His father’s side shows a more recent story of immigration.

At least five generations of his father’s ancestors were born in Sicily, including the pope’s grandfather, Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano Alito, in 1876. He most likely immigrated to the United States in 1905.

Salvatore Giovanni Gaetano Riggitano Alito

Salvatore was on his way to becoming a priest but was unable to take his vows and chose to marry instead.

However, the person who shows up in the pope’s family tree opposite Salvatore is not his wife. It is his lover, Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine, who was born in France and, like Salvatore, immigrated to the United States, 10 years after he did.

A newspaper clipping from 1917 tells part of their story.

Their extramarital affair produced two sons out of wedlock, Jean, the pope’s uncle, and Louis, the pope’s father. They were given their grandmother’s maiden name, Prévost.

That’s how the pope ended up with a French surname — minus the accent — even though his paternal grandfather’s ancestors were almost all Italian.

His surname befits the fact that a significant portion of his ancestry — on both parents’ sides — traces back to France.

Of his ancestors so far identified, 40 are from France, 24 are from Italy and 21 are from Spain.

Of the pope’s eighth-great-grandparents known to have been born in France, all had relocated to Quebec by the mid- to late 1650s.

Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to numerous Canadian-derived distant cousins, including Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna.

Louis’s descendants, like the pope’s other French Canadian relatives, would settle in the United States within a century, at the same time as his Cuban ancestors were moving to the country.

Many of them ended up in New Orleans.

New Orleans, arguably one of America’s first melting pots, has a long history of cultural and ethnic diversity, peopled first by Native Americans, then by the French and the Spanish, along with a growing number of enslaved Africans.

By 1805, according to one census, more than half of the city’s population was composed of enslaved and free people of color. The pope’s ancestors have many intersections with the institution of slavery.

We identified four white ancestors who owned slaves in the United States. (There were probably more, including in Cuba, which was also a slaveholding society.)

His fourth-great-grandfather François Lemelle, enslaved at least 20 people. His second-great-grandfathers Joseph Aristide Baquié and Eugène Grambois enslaved at least three and five people.

Charles (Carlos) Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who served as the Spanish governor of the Baton Rouge District from 1799 to 1808, owned at least 11 enslaved people.

Charles (Carlos) Louis Boucher de Grandpre

Charles was commander of the militia at Pointe Coupée in 1777 during the American Revolution. He interrupted British communication between Baton Rouge and Natchez, which was crucial in ending British control along the Mississippi River.

Around this time, he was recorded as the father of Celeste Olympe de Granpre, the pope’s third-great-grandmother, who is listed in her marriage contract as a “free quadroon,” indicating that her ancestry was thought to be one-quarter Black. (“Mulattos” were half white; “octoroons” were one-eighth Black.)

Pope Leo descends from a long line of individuals — at least 17 — who were identified in various records as “mulatto,” “mulatress,” “mulâtress créole,” “free person of color” and “quadroon.”

Among the more interesting discoveries: The pope’s African American ancestors include not only enslaved people but also enslavers themselves.

It may come as a surprise to hear that African Americans were among those who owned other Black human beings, though the number was small. In 1830, for example, just over 1 percent of the free Black population were slaveholders, enslaving between 1 and 84 women and men.

Eight of his Black forebears are known to have enslaved, in total, at least 40 other people of color.

One of the earliest identified was his fifth-great-grandmother, Marie Louise, who had been enslaved by Sir Baron of Point Coupée. She was described as a “free negresse” in an estate document from 1800.

Her daughters, Fanchon Grenoble and Jeannette Glapion, who is the pope’s fourth-great-grandmother, inherited an estate that included land in Opelousas, La., as well as three enslaved people: 48-year-old Marguerite and her children, Victorin and Zenon. Their names appear on ownership documents from 1800.

The mark of Jeannette Glapion (recorded here as Clapion) is a cross next to her name on this estate document.

Another fourth-great-grandmother of the pope, Marie Jeanne, was an enslaved “mulata,” counted among the property of François Lemelle, of New Orleans.

François Lemelle and Marie Jeanne had at least six children together.

In 1772, François manumitted, or freed from slavery, Marie Jeanne and two of their daughters, Jacqueline and Julie. (In 1777, according to the Colonial Slave Census, he still owned 20 other enslaved people.)

The manumittance document. This line roughly translates to “is freed of the servitude and captivity of which she is serving him.”

At his death, François left Marie Jeanne one-fifth of his estate, which included enslaved people. Thirty years later, her holdings had grown to 1,040 acres, and “her movable possessions included five slaves.”

Over her lifetime, Marie Jeanne would own at least 20 enslaved people, more than any of the pope’s other Black ancestors who have so far been identified as slave owners.

The families of Marie Jeanne and Marie Louisewere united when Marie Louise’s granddaughter, Celeste Olympe de Grandpre, married Marie Jeanne’s son, Louis Lemelle. We found evidence that all enslaved people.

The source of one ancestor’s wealth, that of Odile Copele, described as “mulatto” in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, is not known. She bought a 2-month-old “negro orphan slave named Guillaume Celestin.” In the 1850 census, she is listed as the owner of a 7-year-old girl.

There have always been class divisions within the African American community, often expressed through a series of binaries: enslaved versus free, house servants versus field workers and so on. But class divisions were also defined by physical features: shades of color, hair texture and facial features. These mixed lineages resulted from a range of causes, from rape to second families born of mistresses. The latter, especially, sometimes meant proximity to wealth and inheritance.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the bulk of the pope’s Black slaveholding ancestors are consistently described as mixed-race. (At the time of the 1830 census, according to the historian Thomas J. Pressly, some 40 percent of “Free Colored Persons” who enslaved others possessed only one, most likely a family member, and often a spouse purchased from a white slaveholder to protect her from being violated or sold.)

Does his family history mean Pope Leo is Black? That depends on definitions, whether legal, historical or conventional. The historian Daniel Sharfstein points out that while the 1865 Tennessee Black Code defined “Persons of Color” as everyone “having any African blood in their veins,” most legal definitions in the 20th century of who was “Black” depended on the measurement of supposed “fractions” of ancestry, such as one-fourth or one-eighth, which were arbitrary and extremely difficult to gauge (as well as entirely unscientific). By 1910, Louisiana law classified anyone “with any appreciable mixture of Negro blood” as a “colored person.” At least 10 other states followed with their own laws of “hypodescent” — the notorious “one-drop rule.” In 1924, Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act defined as a “white person” anyone who had “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”

Though self-identification has supplanted, I believe, the legality of the one-drop rule, all too often this sort of thinking remains a powerful social convention when categorizing the genetic gumbo that characterizes the astonishing number of us who are descended from multiethnic, highly admixed ancestral lineages and who are increasingly representing what it means to be “American.” The fantasy of genetic purity is belied by simple commercial DNA tests — and a DNA test would be required to determine the percentages of sub-Saharan African (or Spanish or French or Italian) “ancestor regions” from which Pope Leo might have descended over the last few centuries.

This ambiguity, as well as the sheer heterogeneity of the pope’s ancestry, with its quite colorful, multiple roots and branches, may be what makes it so truly American: a reflection of the complexities of the conquest and settling of the New World, the vast extent of voluntary European immigration and the involuntary, forced migration and enslavement of people of African descent who were brought to the Americas.

Perhaps the most salient feature of Robert Francis Prevost’s family tree is that it is strikingly “ecumenical,” an expression of the endlessly fascinating, multifarious geographical and ethnic threads that make up our grand national story, threads that combined to help shape the truly cosmopolitan worldview of the man we might think of as the first pan-American pope.