Pope Leo XIV's Wheel of Kinships

The New York Times Magazine recently published a story on the ancestry of the new Pope. The article was by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. I was one of the researchers tasked with working on some of the Pope’s ancestors, particularly those in colonial New France (Quebec, Canada).

I was in Paris when the election of the new pope was announced. While I was on a bus, I found both the pope’s father’s birth certificate in Chicago, showing his parents were both born in France (that turned out to be only half right), and the pope’s mother in the 1920 census in Chicago showing her parents were from Louisiana. I was excited about the research possibilities of the first pope with North American ancestry. A few hours later when I returned to my hotel I saw a Facebook post by Jari C. Honora, an expert genealogist on Louisiana and Gulf Coast families who had written a fantastic article in the Mayflower Descendant in 2020.¹ Jari had posted census entries and the marriage record of the new Pope’s maternal grandparents in 1887 at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, noting that Pope Leo XIV has Creole of color roots from New Orleans! The post was shared widely, and subsequent articles have appeared expanding upon Pope Leo XIV’s Louisiana ancestry.

So, while we were tasked with researching the pope’s ancestry, one of the parts I was involved with concerned his ancestral ties back to Quebec. Having grown up in a Connecticut town with a large French-Canadian population, I traced many of my friends’ ancestors back to the colonial French families of Quebec. Similar to New England Yankee ancestry, most people with French-Canadian ancestry will often find themselves related to many other people with the same colonial ancestry, due to these families staying put for generations, intermarrying with one another, and then spreading out.

Baptism of “Maria Olimpa Celeste mulata,” shared on June 5, 2025 by Creolegen

The way to French Canada is through the pope’s great-great-great-grandmother, Celeste Olympe de Granpdre (1781-1833). She was baptized in New Orleans on August 7, 1781, the daughter of “Maria Juana, Mulata libre.” Celeste’s 1798 marriage contract at Opelousas Post to Louis Lemelle notes that she is a “carteronne libre,” a native of Pointe Coupeé, 17 years old, the natural daughter of Charles Grandpres and Jeanette Clapion [Glapion], free mulatresse.

“Charles Grandpres” was Charles Louis Boucher de Grand Pré (1745-1809), also known as Carlos de Grand Pré. As a subject of Spanish West Florida, Carlos was commander of the military post at Pointe Coupeé along the Mississippi River in Louisiana during the American Revolutionary War until July 1781 when he was transferred to Natchez (he later served as a commandant of Natchez District from 1786 to 1792, and governor of the Baton Rouge District from 1799-1808, and died in Havana, Cuba in 1809). Celeste, as she was baptized in August, was likely born just after her father left his military post at Pointe Coupeé the previous month. Celeste’s mother, Jeanette Glapion, was recently manumitted at Pointe Coupeé by Christopher, Chevalier de Glapion, on April 7, 1780.

Charles/Carlos’s father Louis Boucher de Grandpre (1695-1763) was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec and was in New Orleans by 1734 when he married Thérèse Gallard de Chamilly, with whom he had three children (Charles/Carlos being the only son), as well as a natural daughter by a free woman of color. Louis was the grandson of Pierre Boucher de Boucherville (1622-1717), who had emigrated from France to Quebec with his family in 1634. Pierre was a soldier and interpreter to Native tribes as he could speak the Huron dialect of the Iroquoian language from four years of service with the Huron missions of the Jesuits. His first wife Marie Ouebadinskoue was a Huron pupil of the Ursulines of Quebec, although she died in childbirth and they had no surviving children. Pierre served as governor of Trois-Rivières from 1653-1658 and again from 1662-1667. He was sent to France in 1661 to represent the colonial settlement, where he became the first Canadian settler ennobled by King Louis XIV. Pierre and his second wife Marie Jeanne Crevier had fifteen children, all of whom survived childhood, including Lambert Boucher Grandpre, father of Louis.²

Pierre Boucher 

The New York Times Magazine article notes that “through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher …. the pope is related to numerous Canadian-derived distant cousin, including Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Angelina Jole, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac, and Madonna.” The common ancestors amongst these individuals are Pierre’s parents Gaspard Boucher and Nicole Lemaire, who settled in New France in 1634 with their son Pierre and four other children. I had developed the kinship between Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie back in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election cycle, when our organization had significant media attention on the various kinships of the three remaining presidential candidates. The other Boucher descendants were developed by my colleague Rich Hall, also a frequent author in the Mayflower Descendant, on his terrific website, FamousKin (along with a few more not mentioned in the article). I sometimes gets questions about if someone is related to two different people, are those two people also related, and usually the answer is no. In this case, all of these Boucher descendants are also distantly related to one another.

Kindly designed by Ellen Maxwell (with the above wheel of kinships designed by Ginevra Morse), this chart outlines the several distant Québécois cousins of the new pope, who is the most senior generation. Leo XIV is a ninth cousin, once removed to Hillary Clinton, Pierre Trudeau, and Jack Keraouc; twice removed to Justin Trudeau; three times removed to Angelina Jolie and Madonna; and four times removed to Justin Bieber. Gaspard Boucher is also a relative (but exactly how is unknown) of Quebec settlers Jeanne Boucher (wife of Thomas Hayot) and her brother Marin Boucher (husband of Julienne Baril), the latter of whom is ancestral to many of my hometown friends.

Are you also a Boucher descendant?

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French-Canadian Research Guide

Notes

¹ Jari C. Hanora, “A Vermont Engineer and a Free Woman of Color in Louisiana Sugar Country – The Paternity of Laura (Brown) Doley (1846-1928): A George Soule Line,” Mayflower Descendant 68 (2020): 196-209.

² Yves Drolet, Dictionnaire Généalogique De La Noblesse De La Nouvelle-France, third edition (Montreal, 2019), 57-58.