A native of Pitești, Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești was the son of a landowner from Olt, and, on his father's side, the descendant of immigrants from the Epirote area of Ioannina, whose ethnicity was either Aromanian or Albanian. His father became a local leader of the Conservative Party. His mother was a boyaress, and, as art collector and memoirist Krikor Zambaccian recounted, may have been a descendant of the Balotescu boyar clan. Bogdan-Pitești also had a sister, Elena Constanța Bogdan; both she and her mother reportedly survived his death. As one of his eccentricities, Bogdan-Pitești encouraged the—unsustainable—rumor that he was a direct descendant of an ancient Wallachian ruling house, the Basarab Princes.