By Sakara Remmu
In October 2023 Victoria Monet and Kelly Rowland sat down for a discussion about music and life for Rolling Stone Magazine. These two Black women, both powerhouses in the music industry, found a lot of commonalities between art and life, and the video of their talk has since racked up nearly a quarter of a million views on YouTube, and countless readers online.
Kelly Rowland, known for her time as a member of the iconic group Destiny’s Child, and Victoria Monet, a Grammy award winning singer-songwriter in her own right, have both made significant contributions to the music industry.
If you’re like me, there’s one part of the conversation that you’ve probably been thinking about: the moment Victoria tells Kelly the two might be blood-related kinfolk.
Imagine, two of our faves, actually related to each other?! I’ve thought about this more than I care to admit, and for good reason: I’m a genealogist. Obsessing over vital records is my happy place.
It is truly fascinating to think that these two talented women may have a shared heritage. Genealogy has the ability to uncover hidden connections and provide a deeper understanding of our roots. In this case, it has brought attention to a potential family tie between Kelly Rowland and Victoria Monet.
As fans of both artists, we can’t help but wonder how a potential shared ancestry may have influenced their musical journeys. Perhaps there are common themes, influences, or even a shared musical talent that has been passed down through generations.
The dive we’re about to take into Victoria and Kelly’s genealogy is for anyone who has wondered OMG IS IT TRUE, or anyone who has a general curiosity about what it would take to figure out the answer, with or without DNA. As someone who has been doing genealogy for well over 25 years, I decided to see if I could figure out whether these women are biologically related to each other or not.
Here we go!
From the Rolling Stone discussion:
Monét: So I wanted to share something with you that I recently found out.
Rowland: What? We family?
Monét: We could be. I found out that your dad’s last name is Lovett, and my family’s last name is Lovett. We have Lovett Funeral Home in Mobile, Alabama.
Rowland: L-O-V-E-T-T?
Monét: Yes. So I’m like, we might need to do a little 23 [a.k.a. 23andMe] real quick, because your family’s from the South.
Rowland: Yes! My heart is racing right now. Victoria, that is wild. Are you serious?
Monét: All my music is under Lovett Music Incorporated.
Rowland: This is really blowing my mind. So it’s your dad’s side?
Monét: It’s actually my mom’s side…
Genealogy existed long before DNA was an available research tool. In theory, it isn’t needed to answer this question. But arriving at the right answer depends on how robust the paper trail is for each woman’s relatives and ancestors, and in this case, digitized records.
The reality is Black people’s lives were not always documented with the same intention or care as white people’s lives, and even if documents do exist, they may not be digitized, or may be lost or destroyed over time. But what is truly thrilling about genealogy is that you never know what documents are out there until you start looking, and sometimes the discoveries are mind-blowing.
What does it mean to be “related?”
When we think about what it means to be biologically related, for the purposes of this article we can group relatives into a few categories: immediate family, close family, distant family, and “DNA cousins/family”.
Immediate family is your siblings, parents, or children. Close family are aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Distant family is your great-grandparents, great-aunts, and uncles, and second and third cousins.
DNA cousins/family are great great-grandparents, fourth cousins, and so on. DNA cousins and family refers to people who have a small segment of matching DNA that may be too difficult to trace an individual connection to, because it is so miniscule. But since we don’t have the benefit of DNA in this case, we can’t answer this question either way.
Genealogy and Privacy
Before we look at what the genealogy research shows, an important note about genealogy and privacy. Genealogy is not just a fun hobby. Researching one’s family is an intensely personal process, and there are untold variables that can arise when you start to peel back the layers of your family or someone else’s. For some people it is an uncomplicated process, and for others, there are considerations and consequences.
Typically professional genealogists publish or provide genealogy research in a specific format; we’re careful to note names, dates, places, and attach everything to a primary or secondary source. I personally lean most heavily on documentation, and not word of mouth wherever possible. This means that I would publish information formatted to professional genealogy standards and provide reference information so anyone can look up the information and determine for themselves, the accuracy of what I have put together.
Some would argue that as entertainers, Kelly Rowland and Victoria Monet are public figures, live their lives in the public, and so their genealogy information and documentation is fair game. After all, Ancestry.com just told the world Taylor Swift is related to Emily Dickinson and they have the documentation to back it up.
In this case, I disagree.
Kelly and Victoria are not Taylor Swift. What we know is that both women treasure family; they’ve each worked hard to reconnect to their fathers. They both care about where they come from.
As a genealogist you inevitably discover things about an individual’s ancestors that are extremely personal and meant for family, not the general public.
In the case of Kelly and Victoria, there is a way to answer the primary and secondary research questions without exposing their entire respective family trees beyond what is already publicly known.
Genealogy Research and Sources
Having said that, for my genealogy heads especially, here was my process; I built out a total of 6 research trees for the ancestors of both women focused solely on their Lovett lines to see if I could determine a common ancestor. I needed to build out 6 instead of 2 to work through duplications based on various name variations, particularly on Victoria Monet’s Lovett lineage. This research effort looked at nearly 200 people connected to either Lovett family, and over 400 documents including birth, marriage, death, military, public directories, census, social security, newspapers, and burial records.
Victoria Monet’s Alabama Lovett Family
Victoria Monet was born in Georgia in 1989, but her family is from Alabama. She mentions Lovett Funeral Home in Mobile, Alabama when talking to Kelly in the Rolling Stone conversation.
She is referring to Lovett’s Funeral Chapel, which was founded by Victoria’s maternal ancestors; as she said her Lovett family is on her mom’s side.
Starting from Victoria, and thanks to the records mentioned previously, I was able to trace the Lovett family back 6 generations to approximately 1843, before the Civil War.
Victoria’s 3X great-grandparents had at least 5 children, all born in Alabama.
Instead of running through those branches, let’s pause and look at what we know, which is that Victoria’s Lovett family is Alabama through and through for several generations, and there’s a solid amount of documentation that tells us who was born after 1843, when and where they were born, and where they lived throughout their lives. This is a great starting point that can hopefully, eventually reveal whether or not there is a tie to Kelly Rowland’s Lovett lineage.
So, let’s look at that.
Kelly Rowland’s Georgia Lovett Family
Kelly reunited with her father Christopher Lovett in 2020. In various interviews she and her father spoke about their relationship and Kelly and her father have touched on the challenges he faced in his own life, as a child and as a young man.
But beyond that, we don’t know a lot about Kelly’s father from a genealogy standpoint. Typically, when you research someone, it’s essential to have an idea of one or more of the following: where they were born, the states they have lived, who their parents were, or their date of birth. This kind of information makes it more likely that the correct Christopher Lovett can be identified through documentation and vital records.
Without that information, I started with very generalized searches, and a few assumptions. Using his name, I assumed that he met Kelly’s mother in Atlanta and therefor lived in Atlanta at least nine months prior to Kelly’s birth. I found multiple leads, but none that I could say with confidence, “that is the same man as Kelly’s father”; you’d be surprised how many people in the world have the same name, born around the same time, in the same general area.
Of all the potential matches, I researched the one I felt was the strongest possibility, but it is important to approach the following information as general data about a person named Christopher Lovett, not information that is confirmed to be about Kelly’s father.
This particular Christopher Lovett appears on the 1950 census in Georgia at a young age with his mother and other family members. Right off the bat there are consistent and persistent married and maiden surname spelling discrepancies that challenges the research and its accuracy.
This particular Christopher Lovett’s father is a Lovett. Following that information, I was able to compile a Lovett tree of 5 generations going back to roughly 1860-1867, all in Georgia.
Still, we don’t know enough about Kelly’s father to confidently assert that the Christopher I researched is in fact Kelly’s father. That said, if I happened to hit on the right person, the available records for the family tree of this particular Christopher Lovett shows no obvious connection to Victoria Monet’s Alabama Lovett family.
That may seem like it is therefore impossible to connect Victoria and Kelly, but that’s not the case.
Since we can’t confirm this particular Christopher Lovett is Kelly’s father, we basically toss that tree out and look for Christopher Lovett elsewhere.
We leave Kelly’s tree and go back to where we left off in Victoria’s family tree, which is her 3X great grandparents, all born in Alabama, who had at least 5 children.
We must now research all of the descendants of those two people to figure out if any of them lead to Christopher Lovett and ultimately what we find is room for the possibility: the research is incomplete based on digital record availability between 1875 and 1915 for some of the descendants of Victoria’s 3X great grandparents who have nearly identical names. Technically one of those descendants could lead to Kelly’s father, which means it can’t be ruled out.
And, there is one final factor to account for in determining whether Victoria and Kelly are related, and that is to determine if we can find a connection that crosses state lines, meaning, can we find a connection from Victoria’s Alabama Lovett family to the state of Georgia where Kelly was born, or vice versa.
What’s in a name?
When it comes to the genealogy of Black folks in the United States, we are forced to address a question that impacts us universally; where did my family name come from? The answer is almost always, the name came from a white slave owner.
Victoria and Kelly may not be “related” but the family name they have in common, Lovett, may have originated from the same enslaver or family of enslavers. There could be hundreds of Lovett’s representing dozens of individual families that are not related to each other in modern terms, save the plantation they originated from (breeding practices of the enslaver taken into consideration).
The other issue that comes up when researching surnames, is that they change and come and go over time, depending on how large a family is, and how many males are born into a family to carry the name through the generations. For example, if John Doe has four daughters and those daughters all marry and take the names of their husbands, the Doe lineage for that family, ends. As genealogists, we pay attention to how old a name is, and what the variations of a name are. The longer a name has existed in families, hopefully the greater the chance of identifying a biological connection, if one exists.
For Kelly’s family, we don’t have enough information to confidently identify the Lovett line or determine how long the name has been in her family.
In Victoria Monet’s case, the Lovett name is old, it goes back almost 200 years; 6 generations of her family.
Absent information to suggest otherwise, it is assumed at this stage of the research that Victoria’s Lovett ancestors were born into slavery.
The earliest the Lovett name is documented in relation to Victoria’s ancestors is the 1870 census (the first where Black people were free and listed by name) and in a voter registration almost immediately following the Civil War (when Black people could legally vote for the first time).
As a refresher, Victoria’s Lovett family tree was traced back 6 generations in Alabama. Her 3X great grandfather Lovett, married her 3X great grandmother, a woman named Louisa.
On the 1880 federal census record taken in Alabama, Victoria’s 3X great grandfather Lovett reports that his parents were born in Alabama, which would make 7 generations of Victoria’s family born in Alabama.
And this is where, yet another, previously unknown Lovett pops up.
Victoria’s 3X great grandmother Louisa appears to have had a sister named Mary who also married a man with the surname Lovett; no documented family connection to Louisa’s husband that I could find; these two men could be cousins, or they could have been enslaved by the same people, or they could be complete strangers prior to marrying their wives, we just don’t know at this point.
But it is nonetheless interesting and potentially significant because Mary’s husband reports on the 1880 census, which was taken in Alabama, that his parents were born in Georgia.
If those records are accurate, then technically we have crossed state lines and found a connection between Alabama and Georgia, pre-Civil War, even though the connection shifted from 3X great grandfather’s side of the family to 3X great grandmother’s side of the family; it opens a new and relevant line of research that could help illuminate the interconnectivity of Black Lovett families in the south, particularly for Victoria and Kelly.
And finally, yes, there are records indicating that slave owners with the surname Lovett/Lovette were in Alabama and Georgia.
Next Steps
DNA can tell people if they are related to each other, but not necessarily how they are related; for that answer traditional genealogy research is needed.
If Victoria and Kelly decide they want more information about their potential relationship to each other, they’ll need to work with a professional genealogist to compile more facts about their family members and ancestors to clarify where their respective trees are a bit blurry, to help rule in or out, biological connections to each other. There are more digital and physical records to find.
If a DNA test proves these women are related, a professional genealogist can also help Victoria and Kelly discover how.
Are Kelly Rowland and Victoria Monet related to each other? The initial genealogy research doesn’t say “yes, absolutely.” But it certainly doesn’t yet say “no,” either.
Sakara Remmu is a professional genealogist specializing in Traditional Genealogy, African American Genealogy, and DNA Genealogy. She lives in her IG stories @templeofsak or contact her at help@mybirthfamilytree.com