- Edward Norton is a direct descendant of Pocahontas, according to PBS’s Finding Your Roots.
- The Native American icon is the actor’s 12th great-grandmother.
- Genealogy offers a mix of DNA research and old-fashioned sleuthing.
Edward Norton—actor, director, environmental activist, onetime Hulk—can add one more qualifier to his resumé: distant relative of Pocahontas, according to a new revelation from the PBS show Finding Your Roots.
If you haven’t seen the series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the premise is dedicated to connecting famous people to, well, other famous people—the more farfetched the connection, the better. Apparently, the Norton-to-Pocahontas pipeline had been a family rumor for years, and indeed, Gates confirmed that the link between the Glass Onion star and the famed Powhatan woman of the early 1600s is “absolutely true.”
The finding is the result of a mix of both DNA testing and old-fashioned sleuthing. When Norton asked Gates how he can be sure of the ties, Gates responded that there’s a “direct paper trail, no doubt about it, connecting you to your 12th great-grandmother and 12th great-grandfather, John Rolfe and Pocahontas.”
Leading genealogy companies have popularized the concept of using at-home DNA testing to highlight likely ancestral pasts. By combining Y chromosome testing with mitochondria testing and single nucleotide polymorphism testing, companies feed results into an algorithm designed to slice up a person’s entire genome sequence by using small sections to compare to libraries of DNA data. The testing can then highlight probabilities of connections to ancestry groups, based on the data already in the libraries.
Linking specific people is even simpler. If testers have the DNA of both people, those matches get made relatively simply.
In the case of Edward Norton and Pocahontas, Gates said the paper trail was the final proof in the familial pudding. With such a notable figure as Pocahontas, born in what is now known as Virginia around 1596, tracing her lineage was surprisingly pretty easy. After being captured by the English, Pocahontas eventually married Rolfe in 1614, and the two had a son named Thomas. From there, over many decades, additional generations continued the family tree—often quite publicly—until Norton popped into the picture.
But Norton certainly isn’t a one-man branch in the family tree. Experts believe that about 100,000 people around the world can connect directly to Pocahontas, including a former Virginia governor and a wife of Woodrow Wilson.
“Just makes you realize,” Norton said on Finding Your Roots, “what a small piece of the whole human story you are.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
