Julia Roberts is finding out that she is not who she thought she was. The actress appeared on PBS’ Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr and was left literally speechless after finding out who she really was.
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After researching Robert’s family tree, Gates Jr. went on to discover that the man who was supposed to be her great great grandfather, Willis Roberts, actually died more than a decade before her great-grandfather was born.
Although Roberts’ great-great-grandmother Rhoda Suttle Roberts had been married to Willis since the 1850s, his death left quite a gap in 1864.
“Oh, wait — but am I not a Roberts?” the actress asked as Gates Jr. He went on to explain that a public database instead found “a cluster of matches” that trace Roberts to someone called Henry McDonald Mitchell Jr.
Meet Julia Mitchell
“So we’re Mitchell’s?” Roberts asked. “You’re Julia Mitchell. You are not a Roberts biologically,” Gates Jr confirmed as the 55-year-old laughed. But it doesn’t end there, Gates Jr. added that Mitchell had been married at the time of his affair with Roberts great-great-grandmother and even had six of his own children.
Through data and all that scientific analysis, he also discovered that Mitchell’s mother was a widow who lived four households away from Rhoda. Talk about a wild scandal. This obviously left Roberts as shocked as we were, only saying, “wow,” due to how shocked she was.
He went on to ask the actress how she felt about her scandalous Newfound ancestry to which she replied, “On the one hand, I — truly — my mind is blown,” Roberts stated. “And it is fascinating. And on the other hand, there’s part of me that, when I’m calmer, can still wrap my arms around the idea that my family is my family. And I do prefer the name Roberts!”
“This was a very unexpected turn,” she added. Gates Jr went on to wrap up his findings telling Roberts that Mitchell Jr seemed to have disappeared from the paper trail back in the 1800s. His and Robert’s Newfound ancestors can still be traced all the way back to 18th-century colonial Virginia.
The news of Roberts’ family scandal is just the latest revelation of the show. Back on January 4th, Edward Norton was featured on the PBS show premiere telling that a 17th-century Powhatan woman was his 12th great-grandmother. He also revealed that Norton’s ancestry includes a civil war soldier who wrote to President Abraham Lincoln and a late 19th-century Pro-union labor activist. This can all be traced back directly to the earliest days of colonial America in Virginia when Pocahontas and John Rolfe married in 1614.
You can watch the full episode of Finding Your Roots on PBS’s website.