Julia Roberts and Me — Something Other Than Looks in Common
Life Lessons You Can Learn From Our Ancestry Surprises
Julia Roberts and I may not be similar in beauty or leg length but damned if our lives haven’t recently collided in something other than beauty. After Julia’s news last week, we are certainly sharing surprise life experiences.
If you haven’t heard her latest news — Through genealogy research and DNA testing, Julia Roberts found out, on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” program with Henry Louis Gates, about a long-buried family secret that changed her life as she knew it. Click the link above to find out how the secret was discovered and Julia’s reaction to it.
Her great-great-grandmother had a secret affair with a married man named Henry MacDonald Mitchell Jr. John Roberts, Julia’s great grandfather was the result of that affair. So Julia Roberts is not who she thought she was. She isn’t a Roberts at all. Her bloodline runs through the Mitchell family, not the Roberts family. She’s not blood-related to any of her Roberts relatives.
What does this have to do with me? Well, Julia and I share a similar story of long-buried family secrets.
Put your feet up, sit back, relax, and read my story of hidden secrets and a family scandal that changed my life.
Names and locations have been changed, and photos withheld, to protect the privacy of some family members who have not yet come to terms with this.
In 2020, I joined Ancestry.com, did the swab test, and sent in my DNA. The results were no big surprise to me but did reveal an interesting conclusion about life in Eastern Europe in previous centuries. I am 100% Eastern European Jewish on both sides of my family. 100%. The only surprise to me was that there wasn’t even a smidge percentage of anything else. I mean, everyone has SOME percentage of another ethnicity. Even if it’s 1/10% or less. Nope. Not me. 100% European Jewish.
What that told me about life in that area of the world in previous centuries explained a lot about the behavior and beliefs of my 20th-century family. It demonstrated the insulation of the Jewish culture, partly due to limited travel options, I am sure. Apparently, no one married outside of their religion in the area from which my ancestors came. IT WASN’T DONE. EVER.
My family carried those ideals, customs, and beliefs to America when they arrived in the mid to late 19th century.
As a result, nothing was more forbidden, punished, scandalous, or scorned in my family than marrying outside of the Jewish religion. My mother, her five siblings, and all 12 of my cousins and I were forbidden to date anyone outside of our religion. Not that the rule was followed after it was first broken in 1945.
SCANDAL #1
My family settled on the East Coast of the United States. My maternal grandmother, Etta, married Isaac in 1905 when she was only 16 years old. Etta and Isaac eventually had six children. Three boys and three girls. My mother was the girl in the middle. I never asked Grandma the details of her marriage, but it started SCANDAL #1, which was no big secret. Everyone knew about it.
Isaac was a certified Son of a Bitch. He left Etta constantly, returning every few years, impregnating her, sticking around for a while after the child was born, then leaving again. He left her to be with his other family (common-law wife and children) in the Midwest. The ultimate shame finally occurred in 1930, when Isaac divorced Etta and moved permanently to live with his Midwest family.
For this reason, after registering my DNA with Ancestry, I always expected scores of unknown cousins to come out of the woodwork. I NEVER expected what actually happened.
SECRET SCANDAL #2 UNCOVERED
Last March, I got an email through Ancestry.com from a woman named Melissa, who was searching for her “real” grandfather and traced her DNA to me. It indicated that we were 1st or 2nd cousins. Okay, I thought, here’s the first one of wayward Grandfather’s descendants.
Her story was that there had been many “hush-hush” whisperings over the years about her grandmother Geraldine, and grandfather, Joseph. The story was that her grandmother, who as a young girl, lived in the same city as my family, was pregnant when they married (a disgrace in 1946), but worse was that the baby didn’t belong to Joseph.
Regardless of the baby’s paternity, Geraldine could not have chosen a better man to marry (in my opinion). According to Melissa, he knew the baby wasn’t his, but brought him up as his own, and treated him no differently than the other children he and Geraldine had during their long, happy marriage.
We don’t know how Geraldine and Joseph met, but he was in the military and stationed in the city where my family lived. He married Geraldine, knowing about the baby. When his deployment was over, he and Geraldine moved to his home on the West Coast, where the family still resides.
Melissa’s grandmother Geraldine’s lips were sealed, and although her sisters whispered about the old scandal, it got buried deeper and deeper as they aged and passed away.
Then Melissa’s “grandfather” Joseph died, and Melissa’s father, the “baby” in question, named Joseph Jr., decided to take a DNA test. Although happy in his family life, he always felt something was “off”. He didn’t look like anyone in the family, and he had heard the whisperings.
When the results came in, Joe Jr. was knocked off his feet. His entire world, as he knew it, collapsed. He was 50% European Jewish. He had been brought up Christian. No one in his family was Jewish. He hardly knew anyone Jewish. His feeling was that he had been lied to all his life and he was hurt and angry. He refused to talk about it.
However, the results spurred Melissa and her brothers on a three-year quest to find out who their biological grandfather was. Ancestry led her to me. To our joy and excitement — goosebumps all around — I was able to solve the mystery in one day of emails, texts, and pictures:
1. I sent her a list of the names and birthdates of everyone in my immediate maternal family tree.
2. Based on the date of Joe Jr’s birth, my wayward grandfather had already been living in the Midwest with his other family for over a decade, so that ruled him out as a suspect.
2. My Uncle Paul had died decades before the incident in question.
3. My Uncle Larry was 16 in 1946. Possible, but not probable.
4. My Uncle Howie was 21 and had returned the year before from his naval service in WWII. My grandmother had told me stories of his rebellious reputation before he joined the Navy. Hmmm.
5. Melissa got very excited when she saw the information on Uncle Howie because her aunts had mentioned “ a Jewish man in the navy” as a possible suspect.
6. Up until that time, I had not asked Melissa for her grandmother’s name. When she told me it was Geraldine, I drew a blank. Never heard of a Geraldine. And then- LIGHT BULB MOMENT.
For as long as I could remember, my mother had an old picture album belonging to my Uncle Howie. Lots of pictures of him in the Navy, but three always stood out in my mind. Pictures of him and a beautiful dark-haired girl, whose name he had written as “Geri”. They were taken in front of Grandma’s house and in a nearby park I recognized. I always wondered who “Geri” was and why no one ever mentioned her, but I never asked.
I was shaking with excitement. I messaged Melissa, told her about the “Geri” picture, and asked if she would recognize her grandmother at 19 years old. She said she was shaking as much as I was, had her brothers on the phone to tell them, and yes, she had seen pictures of her grandmother at that age and would recognize her. I texted her the pictures, and she immediately texted back — THAT’S MY GRANDMOTHER!
She was ecstatic to have solved the mystery, found the identity of her biological grandfather, and gained a new cousin. I was thrilled beyond words that I could help her and excited to have found a son and granddaughter of my Uncle Howie. Cousins I never knew I had.
Sadly, her father, Joe Jr., is still not ready to “meet” me or my sister. He’s still processing all of it. However, Melissa did tell me that ever since he found out about his DNA, he has been lighting candles in a Menorah on Channukah. She sent me a picture of it displayed on his mantle this year. It brought tears to my eyes.
My sister and I are sad about him not wanting to “meet” us yet, but we do understand his ambivalence. But he is just as much a first cousin to us as Uncle Howie’s “legitimate” children he had with the woman he married in 1949. Cousins we lost track of long ago, by the way. We told Melissa to let him know that we will welcome him as part of our family whenever he is ready. He IS part of our family.
In the meantime, Melissa and I correspond via email and text and exchange pictures. The picture Melissa sent of Joe Jr. as a young man bears a striking resemblance to Uncle Howie at that age.
There’s still a part of the mystery that will probably never be solved because everyone who would know is dead. Why did Howie and Geri break up? Did he know about the pregnancy? I’m good at interpreting body language and the pictures I saw of the two of them together demonstrated a strong love connection.
This question takes us back to 19th-century Eastern Europe. As I mentioned in the beginning, Jews DID NOT MARRY OUTSIDE OF THEIR RELIGION. It was forbidden. That taboo was brought to America by my family and was so ingrained in my grandmother that she forbade her children from doing so.
Geraldine was not Jewish. Did my grandmother cause them to break up? Did she force the break-up before Geraldine told Howie about the pregnancy? We’ll never know, of course, but the events of the following years seem to indicate so.
IF my grandmother did cause Uncle Howie to break up with Geraldine, he got his revenge on her three years later. Not only did he marry a Catholic girl, but he also converted to Catholicism and brought their two children up Catholic. My grandmother refused to attend the wedding and didn’t speak to him for years. She eventually reconciled with him, mostly because she wanted a relationship with her grandchildren, even if they were Catholic.
CONCLUSION AND ADVICE:
ASK QUESTIONS — If you are lucky enough to still have living parents or grandparents, ask about their lives. Not to garner salacious details about hidden family scandals, but to learn lessons from their mistakes; learn why they behaved in ways you may not understand; learn what impact family history has had on your life; learn what you can teach your children about their heritage that may benefit them.
GET THAT DNA TEST — Why not? It’s fascinating, educational, and informative to learn where you came from and the history of your ancestors. It’s also medically informative. In our case, one of Melissa’s brothers developed an autoimmune disease that appeared nowhere else in the family. She asked me if it was in my family, which it was not, but I gave her a list of what diseases are prevalent in my family.
I hope you enjoyed my story. It was quite exciting for everyone involved.
Note: I have NO monetary affiliation with Ancestry.com or any other genealogical site, so if you decide to get tested because of this story, it will not benefit me.
©Joan Gershman 2023
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Julia Roberts story
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/entertainment/julia-roberts-roots/index.html
https://people.com/movies/julia-roberts-learns-she-isnt-actually-a-roberts-after-dna-test/