From Normandy to Monaco: Leo XIV’s French roots

Suzanne Fontaine left Le Havre in 1915 and crossed the Atlantic while expecting her first child. She traveled from Illinois into Canada so the birth could occur quietly in New York State in 1917. Fontaine had grown up in Normandy as the daughter of pastry chefs from Calvados and the Pays de Caux. She settled in the United States and formed a family with Salvatore Riggitano, a Sicilian immigrant born in 1876 who taught Romance languages. The children received the surname Prevost instead of Riggitano. They took the maiden name of Fontaine's mother, Jeanne Eugénie Prévost, and dropped the accent to fit American records. Salvatore also used the name John Prevost in the United States. The oldest son, John Centi Prevost, later taught French and completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1952 on dandyism in France. His younger brother, Louis Marius Prevost, born in Chicago in 1920, also became a language teacher and high school principal. On the maternal line, Mildred Agnes Martinez descended from New Orleans families of free people of color. Her great-grandmother Eugénie Grambois, born in 1838, was baptized at St. Louis Cathedral in French, and several ancestors came from Guadeloupe through the Baquié line. Further records link the family through the Boucher de Grandpré line to Pierre Boucher, governor of Trois-Rivières in New France. Separate research in Monaco archives established Monegasque ancestors on the maternal side dating to the sixteenth century. Robert Francis Prevost was born in Chicago on September 14, 1955. His mother was forty-four at the time, continuing a pattern of wide generational spacing that meant he never met his maternal grandparents. The same research supported his March 28 visit to Monaco, where officials presented the newly identified Monegasque heritage.