JFK, Mona Lisa, and the Missing Evidence in the Fitzgerald Family Tree

A family tree can make an extraordinary claim look like an ordinary fact. Connect enough names with enough lines, and a medieval Irish dynasty can suddenly produce an American president and the woman in the world's most famous painting.

That is the problem with UsefulCharts' FitzGerald Dynasty Family Tree | Irish Genealogy.

The video traces one of Ireland's most influential aristocratic families through Norman conquest, Welsh royalty, rebellion against Henry VIII, and the Dukes of Leinster. Much of that history has a substantial documentary foundation.

Then the presenter takes the family back to Florence, Italy, through an ancestor named Otho Gherardini. This Italian connection eventually supplies the episode's most memorable revelation: John F. Kennedy and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa were supposedly distant cousins.

The difficulty is that the decisive genealogical connection is precisely the one the video fails to establish.

A historian investigated this ancestry more than a century ago. His findings challenge the story at its foundation. The surviving correspondence also contains something the video leaves out: evidence that the families themselves were uncertain about their supposed common ancestry.

The result is an attractive historical narrative presented with considerably more certainty than its evidence deserves.

The Italian Ancestor Who Makes Everything Possible

The first part of the Fitzgerald story is relatively straightforward.

Gerald of Windsor was an Anglo-Norman nobleman whose descendants became powerful landowners in Ireland. His father, Walter FitzOther, held an important position at Windsor Castle. Gerald married Nest, a Welsh princess, and their descendants played significant roles in the Norman conquest of Ireland during the twelfth century.

The Fitzgerald name means son of Gerald. The family's subsequent rise through the Earldoms of Kildare and Desmond is central to Irish aristocratic history.

The problem begins when the presenter moves backward another generation.

He identifies Walter's father as Otho Gherardini, a member of a prominent Florentine family, and treats this as the Fitzgerald dynasty's original Italian ancestry.

That identification changes the entire story.

Without it, the Fitzgeralds are an Anglo-Norman dynasty with important Welsh and Irish connections. With it, the family acquires an additional ancestry reaching into Renaissance Florence and ultimately toward Lisa Gherardini, the woman believed to have sat for Leonardo.

The Italian connection is not a decorative detail. It is the foundation for the episode's final genealogical claim.

And it is not nearly as secure as the presentation makes it sound.

A Historian Challenged This Story in 1902

In 1902, British historian J. Horace Round published The Origin of the FitzGeralds in The Ancestor, a journal devoted to genealogy, heraldry, and family history.

Round examined the family's supposed Florentine origins and compared the inherited accounts with medieval documentary evidence.

His investigation identified a fundamental problem.

The historical record names Walter's father as Other, not as a documented member of the Florentine Gherardini family.

Round questioned how the name Other had developed into Otho and suggested that the latter form may have helped give the ancestry an Italian appearance.

That suggestion is an interpretation, not proof of deliberate alteration. But the underlying distinction matters: the existence of a man called Other does not establish his membership in a family called Gherardini.

Round also questioned an argument based on the resemblance between Gherardini and the Latinized name Geraldini. He noted that Gerald of Wales, a medieval writer belonging to the extended family, used a different Latin form, Giraldidae.

The resemblance between names was therefore insufficient to establish the proposed ancestry.

These were not objections based on modern preferences about family identity. Round was examining the records and names through which the connection was supposedly established.

The Domesday Book Provides a Different Starting Point

Round's research examined Walter FitzOther's appearance in the Domesday Book of 1086.

The survey provides contemporary evidence of Walter's position as a substantial landholder in England. The Open Domesday database still identifies him as Walter son of Other and associates him with numerous properties following the Norman conquest.

Round went further.

He used records concerning Windsor Forest, Abingdon Abbey, and royal charters to reconstruct Walter's documented activities and those of his descendants.

An Abingdon record identifies Walter as constable of Windsor and names his wife Beatrice. A later royal charter confirms lands inherited through Walter and his son William.

These records provide a firmer foundation for reconstructing the family than a supposed Italian surname.

They do not establish that Walter's father came from Florence.

Nor do they conclusively exclude the possibility of a foreign origin. The surviving evidence simply does not supply the missing connection.

That distinction is essential.

A family's ancestry cannot be established by finding a plausible name in one country and a similar name in another.

There must be evidence connecting the individuals.

The Florentines Themselves Expressed Doubt

The most revealing material comes from correspondence that predates Round's investigation by centuries.

According to the historical documents reproduced and examined in his 1902 study, an Irish priest named Maurice visited Florence in 1413 and claimed kinship with the Gherardini family.

The visit appears to have initiated or reinforced contact between the Irish Fitzgeralds and the Florentine family.

But the earliest documented assertion was a claim of kinship, not a surviving genealogical demonstration.

By 1440, correspondence involving the Florentine authorities still treated the relationship as uncertain.

Round highlighted the Latin expression si vera est assertio.

In English: if the assertion is true.

Those four words are devastating to any account that treats the Italian ancestry as established beyond question.

The surviving correspondence, as reproduced by Round, indicates that the relationship was being discussed rather than independently demonstrated.

The distinction becomes even clearer in a letter attributed to Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, in 1507.

Gerald addressed members of the Gherardini family in Florence as relatives and expressed enthusiasm about their supposed common ancestry.

But he also wanted information about the origins of their house and the names of their ancestors.

That is an unusual position for a genealogical claim now presented as settled fact.

The earl believed in the connection, or at least accepted and promoted it. Yet the correspondence did not provide the complete ancestral chain needed to prove it.

More importantly, Round identified competing versions of how the relationship supposedly began.

One account placed an ancestor named Otho in England around the Norman conquest.

Another described three brothers named Thomas, Gerald, and Maurice leaving Florence and joining the conquest of Ireland.

These are materially different origin stories.

They do not simply offer alternative descriptions of the same documented migration. They place the family's arrival in different historical circumstances and generations.

The correspondence also contained an assertion that the family's ancestors reached Ireland in 1140, nearly three decades before the Anglo-Norman expeditions that established the Fitzgeralds there.

Round explicitly identified this as erroneous.

The documents therefore preserve a history of people claiming, discussing, and reinforcing a prestigious relationship.

They do not settle its biological or genealogical foundation.

How a Family Tradition Became an Authoritative Pedigree

The Italian origin story survived because it was repeatedly incorporated into accounts of the Fitzgerald dynasty.

Charles William FitzGerald, later the fourth Duke of Leinster, published The Earls of Kildare, and Their Ancestors in 1858.

The book presented the family's history beginning in 1057, incorporating the alleged early ancestry.

This was not an independent medieval witness. It was a nineteenth-century family history written by a member of the dynasty itself.

Round subsequently identified this account as the version repeated in Burke's Peerage, one of the major reference works on British and Irish aristocracy.

His criticism exposed a weakness in the apparent authority of the claim.

If a genealogical assertion originates in family tradition, appears in a family history, and is then reproduced in a respected reference book, the number of publications does not make the underlying evidence stronger.

It remains one ancestry claim repeated through different channels.

The original family history is identifiable in contemporary bibliographic records, while Round's investigation provides the documentary criticism that later retellings often omit.

The National Library of Ireland preserves another important piece of this story.

Its catalogue identifies a collection of 20 items comprising memoranda, photographs, and letters to the Dukes of Leinster concerning the Gherardini family and its alleged relationship to the Fitzgeralds, dating approximately from 1863 to 1890.

The records are held among the papers of Lord Walter FitzGerald under manuscript reference Ms. 18,853.

The collection demonstrates that the Italian ancestry remained a subject of family documentation and inquiry during the nineteenth century.

Its catalogue description does not independently authenticate the medieval descent. The manuscripts themselves would require further examination before stronger conclusions could be drawn.

This is where UsefulCharts misses a much more interesting history.

The question is not merely whether the Fitzgeralds came from Italy.

It is how an uncertain connection, discussed across centuries by two aristocratic families, became a confident assertion in later genealogical narratives.

A family tree should illuminate that process rather than conceal it.

John F. Kennedy's Fitzgerald Ancestry Does Not Solve the Problem

The video's final section moves from medieval Ireland to twentieth-century America.

John F. Kennedy's middle initial stood for Fitzgerald, the maiden surname of his mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

That much is indisputable.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library provides a documented account of his maternal family's Irish origins.

Kennedy's Fitzgerald ancestors came from Bruff, County Limerick. Members of the family emigrated to America during the Irish Famine era, between 1846 and 1855.

Thomas Fitzgerald, born in Bruff in 1823, married Rose Anna Cox. Their son John Francis Fitzgerald was born in Boston in 1863.

Known as Honey Fitz, he became mayor of Boston and the maternal grandfather of President Kennedy.

His daughter Rose married Joseph P. Kennedy, and their son became president.

This establishes a genuine Irish Fitzgerald lineage.

But it does not establish a documented descent from Gerald of Windsor.

The presidential library's account traces the family's identifiable nineteenth-century origins. It does not supply the centuries of intermediate ancestry connecting Thomas Fitzgerald of Bruff to the medieval Earls of Kildare or Desmond.

The library also preserves a Fitzgerald family Bible brought from Ireland, containing family records beginning in 1857.

That is valuable evidence of the family's more recent history. It is not proof of its twelfth-century ancestry.

The video treats the shared surname as part of a larger dynastic relationship without presenting the intermediate generations needed to verify it.

Even if every earlier claim about the medieval Fitzgeralds were accurate, that would not automatically connect Kennedy's ancestors to them.

A surname identifies a family tradition or naming history. It does not, by itself, establish a continuous pedigree.

The same evidentiary problem affects the episode's reference to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The presenter acknowledges that he cannot identify precisely how the novelist's ancestors connect to the medieval dynasty.

The University of South Carolina's biographical account identifies the novelist's father, Edward Fitzgerald, as coming from Maryland and his mother as the daughter of an Irish immigrant. It does not establish the medieval connection claimed in the video.

The appropriate conclusion is not that these relationships are impossible.

It is that the documentary chains required to establish them have not been supplied.

Mona Lisa Was a Gherardini. That Does Not Make Kennedy Her Cousin.

The episode's most memorable claim depends on Lisa Gherardini.

Unlike the disputed medieval connection, Lisa's identity has substantial historical support.

The Louvre identifies Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo.

The museum's detailed catalogue traces the painting's historical identification and the documentary evidence associated with its creation.

In 2005, a discovery at Heidelberg University strengthened that identification.

A handwritten annotation made in October 1503 by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci recorded Leonardo working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.

The discovery provided contemporary support for an identification previously associated with Giorgio Vasari's account, published in 1550.

Heidelberg University publicly reported the discovery in January 2008.

This provides strong evidence that the woman depicted in the famous painting was Lisa Gherardini.

But the evidence stops there.

Lisa's membership in a Florentine family does not establish that the family produced Walter FitzOther's father.

And even if that medieval connection could be established, Kennedy's descent from the same Fitzgerald dynasty would still require its own proof.

The video's conclusion therefore depends on two separate genealogical connections.

Neither can be supplied merely by establishing the historical identity of Mona Lisa or the Irish ancestry of Kennedy.

The presenter phrases the final claim tentatively, suggesting that Kennedy and Mona Lisa were distant cousins.

That qualification matters. He does not claim to have calculated their exact degree of kinship.

But the uncertainty arrives after the underlying Italian ancestry has already been introduced as fact.

A tentative conclusion does not repair an unsupported premise.

The Kennedy–Mona Lisa Connection That Actually Is Documented

There is an extraordinary historical connection between Kennedy and Mona Lisa that the video never mentions.

On January 8, 1963, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy attended the opening ceremony of the Mona Lisa exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The painting had been loaned by France.

Kennedy delivered remarks thanking France for the gesture and discussing the cultural and historical relationship between the two countries.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library preserves the president's speech materials and photographs associated with the event.

The Louvre independently confirms that the painting traveled to Washington in January 1963 and was subsequently exhibited in New York before returning to France.

That is a verified meeting between Kennedy and one of the world's most celebrated artworks.

It requires no speculative ancestry.

There is a photograph, a date, a location, a presidential speech, and institutional records on both sides of the Atlantic.

The comparison is instructive.

The real encounter can be reconstructed from contemporary evidence. The proposed distant cousin relationship cannot currently be reconstructed from the material supporting the video.

One is documented history. The other remains a genealogical hypothesis.

A Broader Problem With Historical Certainty

The Italian ancestry is the central weakness, but the video also contains a revealing chronological error.

During its introduction to Irish history, the presenter associates 1937 with the establishment of the Republic of Ireland.

The distinction is more complicated.

Ireland adopted a new constitution in 1937, establishing its modern constitutional framework.

The Republic of Ireland Act was passed in 1948 and came into operation in 1949, formally providing for the state's description as the Republic of Ireland and ending the remaining external role of the British monarch.

Ireland's own parliamentary history distinguishes these developments.

This is not comparable in significance to the disputed Florentine ancestry.

It does, however, illustrate the risk of presenting complex historical transitions through compressed explanations.

A chart can make a sequence memorable. It cannot always preserve the legal and historical distinctions that give events their meaning.

The solution is not to abandon simplification.

It is to distinguish established facts from convenient shorthand, traditional claims, and unresolved questions.

The Verdict: The Most Memorable Connection Is the Least Secure

UsefulCharts presents a legitimate and important Irish dynasty through an accessible family tree.

The Fitzgeralds really did become extraordinarily influential in Ireland. Their relationships with Welsh royalty, the Norman conquest, and the English monarchy deserve serious historical attention.

But the episode's claim that the dynasty originated with the Florentine Gherardini family is presented with a certainty the available documentary evidence does not justify.

J. Horace Round identified the problem in 1902.

The medieval correspondence he examined shows a relationship claimed and cultivated across generations, alongside explicit uncertainty and incompatible accounts of its origins.

Later aristocratic histories repeated the Italian ancestry. That repetition did not settle the evidence.

The video then extends the disputed lineage to John F. Kennedy and Lisa Gherardini without providing the necessary genealogical bridges.

I cannot conclude from these records that the Italian ancestry is impossible. Nor can I establish that the presenter deliberately ignored contrary evidence.

The defensible conclusion is narrower and more important: the family's documented history and its claimed Florentine ancestry are not equally well established, and the video fails to make that distinction.

That matters because family trees are unusually persuasive. Their neat lines and connecting branches give uncertain relationships the visual appearance of certainty.

The Fitzgerald family's real history is already remarkable. It does not need an unverified ancestor in Florence or a speculative cousin in the White House.

Historical genealogy should tell us where the evidence leads.

Not merely where a beautiful family tree allows us to draw another line.

References

1. UsefulCharts — FitzGerald Dynasty Family Tree | Irish Genealogy. YouTube video, original publication date not independently established. The primary work examined here; its transcript establishes the creator's claims about the Fitzgerald dynasty, Florentine ancestry, Kennedy, and Mona Lisa.

2. J. Horace Round — The Origin of the FitzGeralds. The Ancestor, No. 1, 1902, pp. 119–126.

The central historical investigation challenging the Florentine ancestry, examining medieval records, and reproducing earlier correspondence between the Fitzgerald and Gherardini families. Its account of the letters is a published historical transcription and interpretation, not a fresh examination of the original manuscripts.

3. Open Domesday — Walter son of Other. Open Domesday, Anna Powell-Smith, based on the Domesday Book of 1086.

Provides the recorded name and English landholdings of Walter FitzOther, establishing a documented medieval starting point without confirming the claimed Florentine ancestry.

4. Charles William FitzGerald, fourth Duke of Leinster — The Earls of Kildare, and Their Ancestors: From 1057 to 1773. Hodges, Smith & Company, 1858.

A nineteenth-century family history that incorporated the earlier ancestry subsequently criticized by Round; evidence of the tradition's publication, not independent proof that it was correct.

5. National Library of Ireland — Memoranda, Photographs and Letters to the Dukes of Leinster. Lord Walter FitzGerald Papers, Ms. 18,853, approximately 1863–1890.

Catalogues 20 manuscript items concerning the Fitzgerald family's claimed Gherardini ancestry; the listing establishes the collection's existence but does not verify the genealogical claims within it.

6. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum — John F. Kennedy and Ireland. February 26, 2026.

Documents Kennedy's maternal Fitzgerald ancestry from nineteenth-century Ireland through Boston, including family records, migration history, and his grandfather John Francis Fitzgerald.

7. University of South Carolina Libraries — A Brief Life of Fitzgerald. Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, undated.

Establishes the novelist's immediate family background and provides no documented connection to the medieval Fitzgerald dynasty.

8. Musée du Louvre — Portrait de Lisa Gherardini, épouse de Francesco del Giocondo, dit La Joconde ou Monna Lisa. Collection record, interpretive text by Vincent Delieuvin, July 2021; catalogue updated September 2025.

Provides the museum's identification of Lisa Gherardini, the painting's historical documentation, and its exhibition history, including the 1963 visit to the United States.

9. Heidelberg University — Mona Lisa's Identity Established Beyond Doubt. January 14, 2008.

Explains the discovery of Agostino Vespucci's October 1503 annotation, providing contemporary evidence for Leonardo's portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.

10. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum — Remarks at Mona Lisa Exhibition, National Gallery of Art, 8 January 1963. Presidential Papers, President's Office Files, January 8, 1963.

Preserves contemporary documentation of Kennedy's participation in the exhibition opening, including presidential remarks and related official materials.

11. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum — Opening Ceremony, Mona Lisa Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. White House Photographs, January 8, 1963.

Provides photographic archival documentation of the president and first lady attending the Mona Lisa exhibition.

12. Houses of the Oireachtas — History of Parliament in Ireland and Notable Debates in the Dáil. Irish parliament, 2020 and 2022.

Establishes the distinction between Ireland's 1937 constitutional settlement and the Republic of Ireland Act, which took effect in 1949.