More than 13,000 people are known to share the same Canadian ancestor as Beyoncé, according WikiTree—but this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Through her mother, American singer-songwriter Beyoncé is the sixth great-granddaughter of Acadian resistance leader Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, who led 193 refugees to Louisiana in 1765.
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Di Beausoleil and his French-speaking Acadian kinspeople are the ancestors of today’s Cajuns; they settled in Louisiana prior to the Louisiana Purchase, having been expelled by the British from the region of the present-day Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
Today, anyone able to trace a continuous line of descent to Broussard is not only a distant relative of Beyoncé, but also a Canadian citizen by descent, since changes to Canada’s Citizenship Act last December eliminated the generational limit for inheriting Canadian citizenship.
How to find out if you’re related to Beyoncé through Joseph Broussard
To see if you too, like Beyoncé, have Canadian citizenship as a descendent of Broussard, you can either hire a professional genealogist, or do it yourself by conducting your own research and mapping your ancestry backward.
Step 1: Pick a place to save your information
Start by identifying a single repository to document your findings.
The repository will need to be able to document a record for each ancestor, including fields both for information specific to the ancestor, and their relationship(s) to other ancestors.
For most amateur genealogists, the primary types of solutions will be general purpose software, or specialized software for genealogical research.
Go-to examples of general-purpose software would be spreadsheets such as Excel or Google Sheets, or visually oriented software such as Visio, LucidChart, or Miro.
Specialized software would include Family Tree Maker, MacFamilyTree, and RootsMagic.
You may also want to consider capabilities for backing up your data and/or versioning your work to minimize the risk of data loss.
Step 2: Map your genealogy
A) Build your ready-at-hand family tree
Ultimately, you are looking to identify as many of your ancestors as possible, as far back as you can, by mapping parent-child relationships from generation to generation.
Start by creating records for all the ancestors you can identify with the information you have ready at hand, on the basis of your own knowledge, conversations with family members, and/or your own and your family’s files and records.
Typically, your starting point would be with your own parents, followed by your grandparents, then your great-grandparents, continuing to work backward generation by generation through completing the parent fields of each ancestor.
For each ancestor you can identify, document as much as you can, saving all the information in your identified repository, and being sure to organize the information effectively in addition to keeping track of your sources.
Here’s an example of what that might look like for a fictionalized researcher, Jesse Williams, who started with his mother:
Ancestor record prepared by amateur genealogist
Core information
| Field | Entry | Source(s) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Sarah Williams | Driver’s license | Alternate spellings include “Sara”; goes by nickname “sally” |
| Birth date | June 17, 1960 | Driver’s license | Premature birth at 35 weeks; birth weight at 2.3 kg |
| Birth location | Houston, Texas, United States | Birth certificate | N/A |
| Citizenship | United States | Birth certificate | N/A |
| Maiden name | Sarah Ahlden | Birth certificate | Has been misspelled as “Alden” and “Aldin” |
| Married names | Brown; Williams | Marriage certificates | N/A |
| Date of death | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Location of death | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Parent 1 | David Ahlden | Birth certificate | Born on September 18, 1935; engineer; Died from brain cancer in 1980 |
| Parent 2 | Julie Ahlden | Birth certificate | Born on July 7, 1930; Secretary; living (95 years of age) |
| First child | Jesse Williams | Baptismal certificate | Born on December 9, 1986, in Houston, Texas |
| Second child | Landry Williams | Baptismal certificate | Born on May 19, 1988, in Houston Texas |
| First spouse | Ronald Brown | Marriage certificate | Salesman, born on August 28, 1960 |
| Date of first marriage | October 22, 1981 | Marriage certificate | Married in St. Paul's United Methodist Church, in Houston, Texas |
| Date of end of first marriage | February 13, 1983 | Interview with Sarah Williams | Divorced due to insupportability |
| Second spouse | Harrison Williams | Marriage certificate | Bank manager at JPMorgan Chase; born on January 1, 1962 |
| Date of second marriage | November 30, 1985 | Marriage certificate | Married at the First Houston Methodist Church |
| Date of end of second marriage | March 29, 2010 | Interview with Sarah Williams | Harrison died in a boating accident. |
| Bio | Born pre-term to David and Julie Ahlden, Sarah grew up in Houston, Texas, where she lived until 1991, then moved to Santa Ana, California with her husband and two children. Married twice, first to Ronald Brown, whom she divorced about 1.5 years later. She remarried to Harrison Williams, with whom she had two children—Jesse and Landry Williams—and cohabited until his death in 2010. Now 65, she still lives in Santa Ana. | Interview with Sarah Williams | N/A |
Supplementary information
| Field | Entry | Sources | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Occupation(s) | Bookkeeper; waitress; nurse | Interview with Sarah Williams | Workplaces included: - Houston Heights Neighborhood Library - Tony’s - Houston Methodist Hospital |
| Cities lived in | Houston, Texas, U.S.; Santa Ana, California, U.S. | Interview with Sarah Williams; postcards + personal letters | Traveled via interstate highway system from Houston, Texas, to Santa Ana, California via in 1991 |
| Religion/denomination | Christianity - Methodism | Baptismal certificate; interview with Sarah Williams | Moved churches from the First Houston United Methodist Church in Texas to First United Methodist Church of Santa Ana in California |
| Military service | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Other partners | Johnathon Strickland | Interview with Sarah Williams | 8 months in 1984 |
| Hair colour | Blonde | Personal observation | N/A |
| Eye colour | Blue | Personal observation | N/A |
| Race | Caucasian | Personal observation | N/A |
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Location of source information
| Document | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Birth certificate | Home filing cabinet | Intend to photocopy |
| Marriage certificate – Ronald Brown | ? | Misplaced |
| Marriage certificate – Harrison Williams | Displayed on mantle in home of Sarah Williams | Intend to photocopy |
| Divorce decree | Harris County Civil Courthouse | Intend to request copy from the Harris County District Clerk |
| Baptismal certificate | Home filing cabinet | Water damaged, request copy from parish office |
| Family photobook | Storage facility | Unit 55 at Public Storage, Santa Ana |
| Driver's licence | In possession of Sarah Williams | Intend to photocopy |
| Additional documents | Home filing cabinet | Post cards, personal letters |
The most important fields are those for parents, children, and spouses, as these are the core requirements needed to build the family tree documenting your ancestry.
That said, you should aim to collect on each ancestor as much personal biographical and family information as you possibly can.
Identifiable information about any given ancestor will often be required to confirm that a given piece of information in a source relates to that particular ancestor rather than to some other person, and will often be critical for validating the core parent-child relationships.
To ensure you track your work effectively, don’t leave blank fields.
If something isn’t relevant, update the field with “N/A.”
If something is unknown, update the field with a “?” or another placeholder indicating that with your current knowledge, you do not know what information, if any, ought to go in that field.
B) Expand your tree in search of Broussard’s descendants
After you’ve built out records for all the ancestors you could identify on the basis of what you had ready at hand, you’ll be left with a series of question marks for the parent relationships of the furthest-back ancestors: perhaps those are your great-great grandparents, or great-great-great grandparents, whose names you do not know.
With the aim of identifying the parents of your oldest known ancestors, you can consult online genealogy and family history platforms to attempt to identify the members of the earlier generation.
Start by building a list of sources that you can consult. Examples would include the following:
Order the sources by level of priority, then work through each source one by one, inputting known information about your existing ancestors to attempt to identify related ancestor records in the database.
You can expect to encounter records of ancestors that you have already done research on, and you may also encounter records of ancestors you have not learned of before.
For each relevant ancestor record you find, update your own repository with the information, whether that means adding a new ancestor and filling in as many fields as possible for that new record, or simply updating an existing ancestor.
Be sure to document the correct parent, child, and spouse relationships, which may require updating old records when you add a new record.
For each and every piece of information, make sure to note the source, and when relevant, flag any discrepancies in information between conflicting sources.
Each time you consult an existing ancestor record, update your current documentation, making any corrections or additions that are appropriate, being sure to note the source of any information and flag any discrepancies between sources.
Continue to work backward, generation by generation, as far as you can, to see if eventually once of the ancestors added to the top of your family tree happens to be one of Broussard’s known descendants.
As a boon to amateur genealogists, Broussard’s family line has been recorded extensively on databases such as Geneat, WikiTree, and Geni, and FamilySearch.
If you persevere with your research, eventually you will end up at one of three possible outcomes:
- You hit Broussard ancestry: You will connect your family tree to an ancestor who is known to be one of Broussard’s descents, indicating your relation to Beyoncé and your Canadian heritage.
- You “miss” Broussard ancestry: You will extend your family tree one or more generations elder to the youngest well-mapped generation of Broussard’s descendants. The lack of overlap of your family tree with Broussard’s descendants would suggest that you’re unlikely to be related to Broussard, unless some specific gap in the available sources left out one or more siblings within the mapped out generations.
- You hit a wall: Your top level of ancestors has all “?” for their parent relationships, and there are no further sources you can consult to attempt to fill in those blanks.
Even if you’re not related to Beyoncé through Broussard, you might encounter a different Canadian ancestral line.
If even one of your ancestors had Canadian citizenship at the time that their child, from whom you descend, was born, then you yourself have the right to Canadian citizenship, provided you were born prior to December 15, 2025.
If you can obtain copies of the required official documents proving the Canadian citizenship of your ancestor and your continuous line of descent, you can apply for a proof of Canadian citizenship certificate.
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Applying for a proof of citizenship certificate
In a proof of citizenship application, you must include documentary proof of your continuous line of descent from a Canadian ancestor—such as birth certificates, baptismal records, and marriage licenses.
If you have successfully identified a Canadian ancestor, you can begin gathering the required official documents to include in your application, which will generally require reaching out to the relevant Canadian provincial vital statistics office(s) and/or archive(s).
Because many of Broussard’s children hail from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, if you’re Canadian as a distant relative of Beyoncé, your best bet will likely be the Nova Scotia Archives or the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick for historical documents antedating the 1930s.
Both provincial archives have been experiencing surges in demand from Americans seeking supporting documents, so they may take additional time to reply.
With compliant copies of the required official documents in hand, along with compliant professional photographs, you’ll have most of the additional documentation needed on top of the application form itself and proof of payment.
Those who submit their applications today, as of the time of writing, can expect to have their application processed within 12 months, up from five months as of July 2025.
As of the time of this writing, there are 70,400 individuals in the citizenship certificate application queue—many of them Americans seeking backup passports.
Once your citizenship certificate has been issued, you may apply for a Canadian passport. Current passport processing times range from 10–20 days, and a money-back guarantee applies if processing is not completed within 30 days.
Implications of U.S.-Canadian dual citizenship
This certificate provides official recognition that an American is, in fact, a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen under Canadian law on the basis of their ancestry.
Those with U.S.-Canadian dual citizenship are afforded the full rights and privileges of citizenship in both nations.
They can enter, reside, work and/or study in Canada freely, vote in Canadian elections, and can access healthcare and social services if they establish residency in Canada.
A Canadian passport offers visa-free travel to more countries than the U.S. passport and can allow holders aged 18–35 to reside and work in 36 countries (e.g., Australia, Greece, Switzerland, and Taiwan), for up to two years, through youth mobility programs.
Acquiring proof of Canadian citizenship or obtaining a Canadian passport does not create any additional Canadian tax obligations for U.S. citizens. Unlike the United States, Canada does not apply a worldwide tax on its citizens.
Dual U.S-Canadian citizens Canadian taxes if they chose to establish residency in Canada, or have other financial ties to Canada, such as ownership of real estate, businesses, or other assets located in Canada.
Americans who develop financial ties to Canada can take advantage of the U.S.-Canada tax treaty, which can serve to provide relief from double taxation.
About Joseph Broussard
Joseph Broussard is remembered as one of the foremost symbols of Acadian resistance and survival during the era of British colonial expansion in eighteenth-century North America.
He was born in 1702 in the city of Port-Royal in Acadia, French colonial territory encompassing the regions of the present-day Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.
Broussard’s life was shaped by this period of imperial warfare and political instability, including the displacement of French-speaking Acadian settlers from British territories within North America.
As British authorities tightened control over Acadia following its conquest, Broussard emerged as a prominent militia commander who resisted British military campaigns and defended Acadian settlements. Working alongside Mi’kmaq allies, he organized military operations aimed at protecting Acadian civilians and preserving their autonomy.
His resistance became particularly significant during the Great Expulsion of 1755, when thousands of Acadians were forcibly deported from present-day Nova Scotia and surrounding regions. Following years of conflict and imprisonment, Broussard played a decisive role in leading nearly 200 Acadian refugees to the Attakapas region of Louisiana in 1765. He died that same year, after contracting yellow fever.
This organized migration contributed directly to the formation of the Cajun communities that would later define southern Louisiana’s cultural landscape. Today, there are thousands of Americans across the U.S. who can lay claim to Canadian citizenship through Broussard.
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