the american actor Edward Norton discovered that the real-life Pocahontas, the romanticized and mythologized 17th-century daughter of a Native American chief, is her 12th great-grandmother.
The Oscar-nominated star first learned of her family connection to the woman who married Virginia settler John Rolfe on Tuesday’s episode of the PBS genealogy history show “Finding Your Roots.” free translation).
Historian and presenter Henry Louis Gates Jr. confirmed that the long-held family rumor is fact, telling Norton, “You have a direct trail of connection, no doubt, with John Rolfe and Pocahontas, your 12th great-grandfather and great-grandmother.”
According to Gates, the couple were married on April 5, 1614 in Jamestown, Virginia – at a time when William Shakespeare was still alive.
He added that the documents revealed that Pocahontas died three years later in Gravesend, England, while Rolfe died around March 1622.
“It just makes you realize what a small piece of all human history you are,” Norton noted after the reveal.
Pocahontas welcomed English settlers to the present-day United States in the early 17th century. Legend has it that she saved Captain John Smith’s life by stopping his execution by laying her head on his.
The programme, which traces the ancestral stories of celebrities, also revealed that Norton’s third great-grandfather, John Winstead, owned a family of slaves, including a 55-year-old man, a 37-year-old woman and five girls, aged 4. , 6, 8, 9 and 10.
Norton, 53, who said he researched his own ancestry before his appearance in “Finding Your Roots,” expressed that part of the story he didn’t like.
Asked what it was like to see a census that confirmed your relative owned slaves, the actor said: “The short answer is that these things are uncomfortable. And you should be uncomfortable with them.”
“It’s not a judgment on you in your own life, but it’s a judgment on the history of this country and it needs to be recognized first and foremost and then it needs to be faced.”
Norton went on to say that he customized the census details and “when you read ‘eight-year-old slave,’ you just want to die.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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