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Edward Norton‘s family roots go back further than he imagined.
On Tuesday’s season premiere of the PBS program Finding Your Roots, Norton, 53, appeared with host Henry Louis Gates Jr. to dive into his family’s ancestry and discovered that the 17th century Powhatan woman Pocahontas is his 12th great grandmother.
In the episode, host Gates Jr. revealed that Norton’s ancestry — which includes a Civil War soldier who wrote to Abraham Lincoln and a late 19th century pro-union labor activist — can be traced directly back to the earliest days of colonial America in Virginia, when Pocahontas married English settler John Rolfe in 1614.
“I understand that was family lore,” Gates Jr. told Norton, who said he had grown up hearing family tales that they were related to the Indigenous figure, in the episode. “Well, it is absolutely true.”
“John Rolfe and Pocahontas got married on April 5, 1614. Shakespeare dies in 1616, just to put this in perspective,” the host continued, adding context to the time period. “Pocahontas died sometime in March 1617 in Grave’s End, England, and John Rolfe died around March 1622.”
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“This is about as far back as you can go, unless you’re a Viking,” Norton responded. “Makes you realize what a small piece of the whole human story you are.”
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Elsewhere in the episode, Norton learned that a third great-grandfather of his named John Winstead was recorded as having owned enslaved people in the 1850 North Carolina census, a revelation from Norton’s family’s past that the actor called “uncomfortable.”
“The short answer is these things are uncomfortable, and you should be uncomfortable with them, everybody should be uncomfortable with it,” Norton told Gates Jr. after learning of the census count. “It’s not a judgement on you and your own life, but it’s a judgment on the history of this country and it needs to be acknowledged first and foremost, and then it needs to be contended with.”
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Gates Jr. mentioned during the episode that Norton, who explained that his grandparents transcribed the journals of at least one 19th-century ancestor, arrived to the Finding Your Roots taping better prepared to talk about his family’s genealogy “than any guest I can recall.”
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“I gotta be honest, one of the things that amazes me is that they were making these kinds of records in that kind of a tumultuous time,” Norton told Gates Jr. after the host reaveled through registration papers that another ancestor joined the Continental Army under George Washington in 1777.
The full season premiere of Finding Your Roots also featured Julia Roberts, whom Gates Jr. revealed at the end of the episode has a similar enough sequence of DNA to Norton to determine that they share a common ancestor somewhere in their ancestry.
The full episode can be found on PBS’ website.
