Stephen: Edward Norton discovers Pocahontas is his 12th great-grandmother

Photo: Bridget Laudien / CC BY-SA 3.0

Fresh off his performance in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Edward Norton appeared on the season nine debut of PBS genealogy show Finding Your Roots, where he found out that he is directly related to one of America’s most well-known indigenous figures. Host Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed to Norton that he is a direct descendant of Pocahontas, his 12th great-grandmother, and her husband John Rolfe, one of the first English settlers in what would become the United States. Pocahontas and Rolfe were married in 1614, with Gates telling Norton “You have a direct paper trail, no doubt about it, connection to ”. She died three years later.

It was also revealed in the interview that Norton’s third great-grandfather, John Winstead, was a slave-owner of a family of 7, a 55-year-old man, a 37-year-old woman and five young girls, aged 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10.. Norton said of this discovery “The short answer is these things are uncomfortable. And you should be uncomfortable with them … when you read ‘slave aged eight,’ you just want to die.”