Lady Gaga and Madonna are not distant cousins

Contrary to the announcement made by Christopher Child of New England Historic Genealogical Society in mid-May 2011, Madonna and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, are not related.

Chris Child claimed that the two singers had common ancestors, Jean Bessette and Anne Seigneur, who moved from France to Quebec in the 1600s. Jean-Francois Loiseau, a French genealogist who studied the parish registers in Quebec, has got evidence to refute this hypothesis. Official documents confirm that Madonna is a descendant of this French-Canadian couple but, in the present state of our knowledge, Lady Gaga is not.

François Bessette, a descendant of Jean Bessette, was born on 9 November 1759 in Chambly (Quebec) and married Marie Fonteneau dit Dumoulin on 9 January 1785 in Pointe-Olivier St-Mathias (Quebec). They gave birth to a son Jacques Pascal on 20 March 1796 in the same parish.

Chris Child assumed that Jacques Pascal Bessette was Jacob Bessette/Bisset (a likely ancestor of Lady Gaga) who married Sarah Enochs on 22 August 1805 in Fayette Co. PA (USA). The 1850 United States Federal Census mentioned that Jacob was 64 years old in 1850 (i.e. born around 1796) and Maryland as place of birth.

The problem is that Jacques Pascal Bessette never moved to Michigan and he died when he was 14 years old on 16 August 1810 in Pointe-Olivier St-Mathias (Quebec). Therefore, he cannot be Jacob Bisset. The Jacques Pascal Bessette burial certificate can be viewed in the Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967 on ancestry.ca.

If today, no evidence has emerged concluding both divas are related, there is still a lot of documents to explore in the registers in Quebec and in ... Italy. Both Madonna and Lady Gaga have Italian blood. Even if Lady Gaga sings "Born This Way", her ancestry is still a mystery!