Actor Edward Norton now knows who his great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother is. The TV presenter Henry Gates revealed it to him in front of the camera on the show “Finding our roots”. Norton’s family tree can be traced back to 1614, there is no doubt about that. “Pocahontas is actually your twelfth grandmother,” Gates told Norton. “Oh my God,” said Norton.
Pocahontas is in the history of the USA – written from the point of view of the white majority – a myth that the oppression of the native americans to transfigure and suggest that the colonization of the New World was, on the whole, peaceful. Tribal woman meets English planter, falls in love and immerses herself in his world. In 1995 there was a very successful Disney film about it.
Research into family roots, or genealogy, is also becoming increasingly popular in Germany. There is no television show in this country, but anyone can order a DNA kit online and have their own saliva sample tested for less than 100 euros. One is 29 percent Western European and 14 percent Russian-Jewish, which then brings such information to light that is initially hardly helpful. Special websites help you to find a third cousin you never knew existed in the vast gene pool known as mankind. Anyone who wants to go further learns to decipher Sütterlin writing and rummages through church registers to find out what the ancestors did in the seventeen hundred shoot me dead.
As Edward Norton put it, “It makes you realize what a small piece of the vast human story you are.” Sounds like humility – and humility might not hurt in these slightly megalomaniac times.
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