The hidden secret of his ancestors

Julia Roberts is not who I thought she was. The actress participated in the American PBS channel Finding Your Roots and He was left speechless when he discovered a hidden secret about his ancestors.

After researching the Roberts family tree, the program discovered that the man who was supposed to be his great-grandfather, Willis Roberts, He actually died more than a decade before his great-grandfather was born.

Although his great-grandmother Rhoda Suttle Roberts had been married to Willis since the 1850s, His death in 1864 left a staggering hiatus.

“Oh wait, but aren’t you Roberts?”the Hollywood star asked when the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., walked through her findings.

Program researchers found in public databases “a set of matches” that They led the actress to a man named Henry MacDonald Mitchell Jr..

“So we’re from Mitchell?” Roberts asked. You are Julia Mitchell.“You’re not biologically Roberts,” Gates Jr. confirmed with a laugh.

To make things even more surprising, the presenter added that Mitchell WHe was married at the time of their relationship to Rhoda, Roberts’ great-grandmother, And he had six children.

Through careful investigation of census data, he also discovers that Mitchell’s mother, a widow, He lived “only four houses” from Rhoda. “Wow,” is all Roberts can say as Gates Jr. flashes his true family history until he asks how he feels about his newfound parentage.

“On the one hand, I’m really, really, really mind blown. It’s amazing. And on the other hand, there’s a part of me that, when I’m a little calmer, can still embrace the idea that my family is my family.” And I prefer the name Roberts!said the star.

“This was a very unexpected development,” Gates Jr. concluded, explaining that Mitchell Jr. had apparently disappeared from the paper trail at the end of the 19th century. However, his and Roberts’ recent predecessors can be traced back to eighteenth-century colonial Virginia.