Scott Crevier's Family History Scott Crevier's Family History
On June 17, 2025, I discovered my relationship to Robert Francis Prevost, better known to the world as
Pope Leo XIV.
We are 9th cousins once removed.
My uncle had told me the week before that he thinks there may be a connection. With 27 years worth of data and over 8,000 names in my family tree, I accepted the challenge. I created a brand new family tree, entered the name "Robert Francis Prevost", and started looking for his ancestors. Since he became Pope, a number of people had written about his family, so the beginnings of this research were easy but just not deep enough to find a connection.
Then, I found the article that
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
published on June 11, 2025 about the Pope's history, called
"Noblemen, enslaved people, freedom fighters, slaveholders: what the complex family tree of the first American pontiff reveals".
You may know Gates as the producer and host of
"Finding Your Roots"
on PBS
(one of my favorite TV shows). The article provides a
family tree chart
which includes the Pope's 7th great grandmother, Marie Jeanne Crevier
(born around 1636 in France).
With her sharing my last name, I focused my search to find the connection.
While I have over 50 "Marie Crevier's" in my family tree, none were a match. So I started searching for her parents. Using a number of resources, I found something interesting on the Geni.com website. It showed that she is the daughter of Christophe Crevier and Jeanne Evard. Bingo! I immediately recognized those names. They were born in France; Christophe in 1611, Jeanne in 1619. They emigrated to Quebec in 1639, settling in Trois-Rivières. They are my 9th great grandparents.
The image at left is an abstract from the "Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec,". It shows the family of Christophe and Jeanne, including their first child, (Marie) Jeanne born in 1636.
I've known about Christophe and Jeanne for a couple of decades, thanks to a connection I made with my 8th cousin twice removed, Rolland Descheneaux, in Quebec in 2000. I owe much of the success of my research to him and the numerous packets of documents that he mailed to me 20+ years ago (he did genealogy research old school, before computers).
So then I immediately looked back at my own data to figure out why I don't have Marie Jeanne Crevier as their daughter. It turns out I did, I just had her name as "Jeanne Crevier." But, all of her details matched up exactly: birthdate, location, husband's name/birthdate/location, their kids' names, and of course her parents' details.
So ultimately, I didn't have to look far and it didn't take me too
long. I merged the Pope's tree into mine, pushing the total number
of names in my data to almost 9,000.
In addition to my cousin Rolland, I learned a lot about my Crevier family from the book "Our French Canadian Forefathers", by Lucille Fournier Rock (1982). She dedicated a chapter to "The Crevier Family." I had tracked her down, living in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and spoke to her on the phone on June 1, 1999; she gave me permission to transcribe and publish just the Crevier chapter. (Marie) Jeanne Crevier (the one in the Pope's family tree above) and her husband Pierre Boucher are featured on page 7 of this document.
With all of this data in front of me, it was done. The Pope and I are related. We are direct-line descendants of the same couple. As an amateur genealogist for 27 years now, these kinds of finds are a treasure. And it makes our world seem just a bit smaller than it was yesterday.
When you look at names like Christophe Crevier and Marie Jeanne Crevier, you'd think that those ancestors are on my Dad's side of the family, but not in this case. They are on my Mom's side of the family. I've been tracing two lines of Creviers for many years and I have not yet made the connection. I'm convinced that they are indeed connected, I just don't have the proof yet. So if you have some knowledge and you'd like to help, give me a holler.
To summarize our relationship, Christophe & Jeanne (Evard) Crevier are my 9th great grandparents. And they are Pope Leo XIV's 8th great grandparents. So we are direct-line descendants of the same couple. In the genealogy world, this is about the simplest kind of relationship there is (besides maybe siblings, children, and close family).
Some of my Crevier relatives may wonder why I'm related but they are not (as I just explained above). So, I want to provide this chart to show the details of our relationship. Every person in this chart is dead except the Pope and me, so I'm comfortable sharing it:
As you can imagine, people have written numerous articles about the Pope's family history. Here are a few that I've found interesting:
Here are some sites that have created the Pope's family tree:
A significant aspect of genealogy research is the sources. How do you know someone existed? How do you know who their children or parents were? The key documents for most people are their birth, death, and marriage certificates because they have dates, locations, and often the names of other family members (obituaries are great too). If you have a copy of one of these documents, then you can usually consider the information contained therein reliable.
So to be clear, I don't have copies of all of the birth certificates of the people I've found. But this brings me to another significant aspect of genealogy and that is trust. Who do you trust? In the case of the article mentioned above, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. did that work in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. So the simple question is, do I trust their data? Since Gates is a well-respected person in the field of genealogy, the simple answer is yes, I trust him and his team of researchers and I consider the data in the family tree chart they created to be factual.
I also trust many other authors and relatives who have done the work over the years, including the following publications:
It's possible that the Pope and I are connected through two other lines that I'm tracing, both through France in the 1600s. First, I have many Chevaliers on my Mother's side of the family. Perhaps this woman is related to me:
I also have a handful of Prevosts on my father's side of the family. Consider these two people:
Same last name. Same time frame. Same country. The search continues...
As an amateur genealogist, I've made many interesting connections. It's kind of fun when you find out you're related to a well-known figure, especially when that well-known figure is known for good reasons. Until now, the most interesting connection I had made was showing that my wife and Elvis Presley are 3rd cousins once removed. As cool as that was, I'm happy to be the Pope's cousin. 😃 ❤️ 🙏
