The election of Chicago-born Robert Prevost to the Papacy as Leo XIV has been celebrated as he is the first American to ascend to the position. His newly endowed prominence may also be an occasion to explore his ancestral ties that may come close to Maine through his family’s origins in a neighboring Canadian province.
Feeding such speculation are the multitude of French names that populate several lines of his forebears. It begins with his own last name, Prevost. The Prevost name was one which his paternal father obtained when migrating from Sicily; however, it had originally been Riggitano.
His paternal grandmother had, however, been a Fontaine, but was a direct immigrant from France rather than being a Canadian inhabitant close to Maine.
The Pope’s maternal lines seem a bit more promising in the quest to put him on a doorstep of the Pine Tree State. That’s because his maternal grandmother, Louise Baquie, was a Franco-American from New Orleans, according to a report from noted genealogist Jari C. Honora as carried in a recent Chicago Tribune article.
It is to New Orleans that some 3,000 Francos known as Acadians, from what later became eastern Maine and surrounding portions of Canada, fled. This was during Britain’s forcible removal of Acadians in La Grande Derangement as part of the Seven Years War between France and Britain in the late 1700s.
While the new pope’s maternal grandparents each had primarily Haitian and Caribbean origins, his maternal great-great-grandmother, Celeste Lemelle, is a more promising ancestral tributary. According to WikiTree, a credible ancestral website, it is Lemelle who had a great-grandfather from Trois-Riveres, Quebec. His name was Louis Boucher. He was born in 1695 and died in New Orleans in 1763.
This Quebecois antecedent is whom we so far have been able to determine is the papal ancestor with the closest nexus to Maine.
The search goes on, however, and may yet yield a closer family affinity than that with a Boucher ancestor from a city that is a 130-mile drive from our state’s northwestern border. The Boucher surname is nevertheless one of the more frequently occurring and prominent in Maine. One example and possible papal distant cousin would be Riviere, Quebec, native Jean Charles Boucher, a two-term Lewiston mayor and longtime legislator who died in 1960 in his 11th consecutive senate term, a record that still stands.
Paul Mills is an attorney who lives in Farmington. His roots are in Ashland, where his mother grew up. He is a longtime subscriber to The County and its predecessor, the St. John Valley Times.
