Lady Gaga’s Family Tree: How Far a Roots Search Can Reach

Documented family tree & key facts

Lady Gaga — Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. b. New York City, 28 March 1986.
Her Italian roots are on her father’s side: two Sicilian lines from the Province of Messina, both families of shoemakers. (Her mother Cynthia Bissett’s side is American.)

Paternal grandfather’s line — Germanotta, of Naso (Messina)

Antonino Germanotta (the elder) × Petronilla Battà (marriage promise, Naso, 1830s) — furthest documented
 ↓
Francesco Germanotta (b. Naso, 1842), shoemaker
 ↓
Antonino Germanotta (b. Naso, 20 May 1881) × Rosaria Lipari (b. Naso, 1886; m. Naso, 22 March 1904)
 ↓
Joseph Germanotta Sr. (b. Jersey City, 1922)

Paternal grandmother’s line — Calderone, of Santa Lucia del Mela (Messina) — seven generations

Domenico Calderone (b. c.1759) — furthest documented; the deepest ancestor in Gaga’s tree
 ↓
Pasquale Calderone (1793–1871)
 ↓
Domenico Calderone (1827–1890)
 ↓
Giuseppe Calderone (1865–1949)
 ↓
Antonio Calderone (b. Santa Lucia del Mela, 5 July 1900), shoe repairer × Cristina Sergi (m. 1923)
 ↓
Angeline Calderone (b. Elizabeth, NJ, 1930 – 2025)

Where the lines meet

Joseph Germanotta Sr. × Angeline Calderone → Joseph ‘Joe’ Germanotta → Lady Gaga.

Worth knowing

Her middle name Angelina honours her grandmother, Angeline Calderone. The Calderone of Santa Lucia del Mela are documented for seven generations, back to a Domenico born about 1759 — older than the United States itself.

Documented by original acts (civil and parish registers of Naso and Santa Lucia del Mela, Province of Messina; U.S. records). The maternal (Bissett / Morningstar) branches are American and are documented separately in the article. Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.

Lady Gaga — Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, born in New York in 1986 — has the kind of family tree that shows what genealogy can actually do. It does not run through one town, or even one country. It runs through two Sicilian shoemaking villages, a corner of central Italy, and the Appalachian frontier of nineteenth-century America. To reconstruct it you work four completely different archive systems at once. This is that tree, branch by branch — and what each branch takes to prove.

The Sicilian heart: the Germanotta of Naso

Her surname is Sicilian, and it belongs to Naso, a hill town in the Province of Messina, where the Germanotta appear in the civil registers for five generations. Gaga’s great-grandfather, Antonino Germanotta, was born there on 20 May 1881, in the contrada Malò; his birth act is drawn up by his father, Francesco, and the family are shoemakers by trade.

On 22 March 1904 — the date family lore misremembers as the year he emigrated — Antonino did not board a ship: he married Rosaria Lipari in Naso. The couple crossed the Atlantic only afterwards, and their son Joseph was born in Jersey City in 1922. Behind them the register keeps going: Francesco Germanotta, born in Naso in 1842, and his own parents — the elder Antonino Germanotta and Petronilla Battà, whose solemn marriage promise survives in the Naso books, reaching back to the 1810s. Rosaria Lipari’s line is documented as well: born in Naso in 1886, daughter of Antonio Lipari, a carpenter, and Benedetta Merendino.

The Naso documents

Five acts from one Sicilian town, across seventy years — click any to enlarge.

A second Sicilian line — also shoemakers: the Calderone of Santa Lucia del Mela

Gaga’s paternal grandmother, Angeline Christine Calderone (Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1930—2025), carried a second Sicilian line — and, remarkably, a second family of shoemakers. Her father, Antonio Calderone, was born on 5 July 1900 in Santa Lucia del Mela (Messina) and appears in U.S. censuses as a shoe repairer; his father, Giuseppe Calderone, lived and died in the same town (1865—1949). Antonio married Cristina Sergi — also of Santa Lucia del Mela, born 1899 — there on 9 July 1923, reached Philadelphia that September, and settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

And the register does not stop at Giuseppe. The Calderone are recorded in Santa Lucia del Mela for seven generations, back through Domenico Calderone (1827—1890) and Pasquale Calderone (1793—1871) to another Domenico Calderone, born about 1759 — the deepest ancestor in Lady Gaga’s entire tree, and older than the United States itself.

The proof is not a family story but a stack of civil acts. Domenico Calderone’s death record of 1845 gives his age as eighty-six and names his own parents — Antonino Calderone and Domenica Trifirò — carrying the line into the early 1700s. For generations the Calderone were herdsmen and day-labourers — a castaldo di mandra tends the flocks; the shoemaker’s bench appears only with Giuseppe and his son Antonio. A family that rose from the land to a trade, and then crossed an ocean.

The Calderone documents

Seven generations in a single Sicilian town, from 1827 back to an act that reaches the 1700s — click any to enlarge.

So both lines that meet in Gaga’s father come from towns in the Province of Messina, and both worked leather and shoes: the Germanotta of Naso and the Calderone of Santa Lucia del Mela. It is a detail no family story remembers — but the records state it plainly.

The tree even explains her name. Her grandmother was Angelina — hence Gaga’s own middle name, Angelina. And her father’s sister, Joanne Germanotta, died in 1974 at nineteen; Gaga carries her name too, and gave it to an album.

The Roman line: the Ferri

Not all of Lady Gaga’s Italy is Sicilian. Through her mother’s mother, Veronica Rose Ferri, the tree reaches central Italy — the province of Frosinone, in Lazio. Veronica’s parents, Giacomo (“James”) Ferri (born about 1882) and his wife — recorded in America as “Minnie,” her surname mangled on the paperwork into forms such as Cambagnia — married in 1924 in the Ohio—West Virginia river country. Their exact Ciociaria town is the next act to pull — a reminder that the American spelling is never the last word.

The American frontier: Bissett, Leech and Morningstar

Gaga’s mother, Cynthia Bissett, brings a completely different world — deep, colonial-era American roots along the Ohio River and in the Virginias. Her father, Paul Douglas Bissett, descends from George Lindsey Bissett (born Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, 1885), whose parents — John Bissett (Pennsylvania, 1851) and Minnie Burghardt (West Virginia, 1862) — were already American-born.

The deepest American branch is the Morningstar—Leech line. George Bissett married Sally Ann Leech, of Mingo Junction, Ohio; her father John Lee Leech (Belmont County, Ohio, 1861) married Georgiana Morningstar (Jefferson County, Virginia, 1859). Behind Georgiana stand Samuel J. Morningstar (Jefferson County, 1837—1917) and, before him, Jacob Morningstar, born in Pennsylvania about 1801 and buried in Jefferson County in 1874 — a family already two centuries deep in America.

What one tree teaches about research

Four branches, four archive systems, none of which speaks to the others. To follow Lady Gaga backwards you read Sicilian civil registers in nineteenth-century notarial hand, U.S. ship manifests and naturalization files, and American county ledgers — and then you reconcile what they disagree about. Family memory said “emigrated 1904”; the register says “married in Naso, 1904.” A secondary tree spelled the great-grandmother Galipo; her own marriage act spells her Lipari. An elder ancestor’s surname looks like Battaglia to a modern eye, but Naso wrote it Battà. Each correction is small; together they are the difference between a story and a proven descent.

This is what a family tree looks like when it is followed all the way down — not the legend of a village left behind, but named people, dated acts, and the towns that still hold their records.

---

Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.