Lady Gaga’s Ethnicity and Family Roots

Father’s side

Joe Germanotta’s grandfather Antonino Germanotta was born in Naso in 1881. He set out for New York in 1908, settled in Jersey City and died there in 1969.^[5][1] His wife, Rosaria Lipari, was also born in Italy. Her death notice in The Jersey Journal in 1962 names eight children, among them Joseph, Lady Gaga’s grandfather.^[6]

Joseph Anthony Germanotta was born in Jersey City in 1922. In 1953 he married Angeline Calderone, who had been born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1930. The couple raised two children and lived in Elizabeth, Short Hills and Montville. Their daughter Joanne died in 1974 at the age of 19 from complications of lupus. Joseph died in 2010, Angeline in October 2025 at 94.^[7][8] Lady Gaga named her 2016 album Joanne after her aunt and said that her death had left a lasting wound on her father’s family.^[4]

In 2018, at a concert in Milan, she met relatives from Naso for the first time. Her parents had visited the town a few months earlier, and Naso has made her an honorary citizen, the Sicilian magazine Balarm reported.^[1] At the Italian premiere of House of Gucci in Milan in 2021 she spoke about her father’s Sicilian roots. She said she was thinking of her late grandfather Giuseppe Germanotta, who she felt was watching over her and was proud of her.^[9]

Mother’s side

Cynthia Germanotta, born Bissett, is the daughter of Paul Douglas Bissett and Veronica “Ronnie” Ferrie. Paul was born in Benwood, West Virginia, in 1926. He worked as an insurance agent for State Farm, was well known as a singer in the Ohio Valley and died in 2013.^[2] Veronica was also born in Benwood, in 1928. She was a homemaker and died in December 2022 at 94.^[10] Where the Bissett family came from is not recorded in the sources we checked.

Veronica’s parents were Italian immigrants. Her father, Vincenzo Ferri, was born in Broccostella in the province of Frosinone in 1881, arrived at Ellis Island in 1905 and settled in Benwood, where the family name came to be spelled Ferrie.^[3] Her mother, Filomena “Minnie” Campagna, came from the same village and arrived in 1913. She was widowed in 1921 and married Vincenzo in 1924. She died in 1940, when Veronica was 11.^[11][3]