Julia Roberts discovers she’s not actually a Roberts

Julia Roberts has discovered that her surname isn’t actually Roberts.

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The Pretty Woman star took part in latest season of the Finding Your Roots TV show from Ancestry. The series sees Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr use genealogical detective work and DNA analysis to help stars discover their family trees.

In an episode which aired last week, Roberts was told that the surname she has gone by all her life was not actually correct. The star was told she’s actually “Julia Mitchell”.

Sitting down with the Mystic Pizza actor, Gates explained: “The story begins with her great grandfather, John Roberts, and with his mother, a woman named Rhoda Suttle.” When asked about the name, Roberts admitted she’d never even heard of Suttle.

However, she does joke that “subtle” — a play on the name Suttle — isn’t a word that’s ever been used to describe her family. As things progressed Roberts was then urged her to turn the page in the 1880 census for Douglas County, Georgia, where she’s shown her great grandfather, full name John Pendleton Roberts.

At the time he was just a toddler and living under the care of his mother, full name Rhoda Suttle Roberts, alongside his three brothers. That said, Gates pointed out that the father is missing. He told the Hollywood star: “Digging into Georgia’s County archives, we discovered that sometime in the 1850s, Rhoda married a man named Willis Roberts.

“Julia carries Willis’ last name. But Willis passed away in 1864, over a decade before Rhoda gave birth to Julia’s great grandfather, John, leading to an inescapable conclusion.”

Speaking to the Hollywood star, he went on to explain: “Willis Roberts could not possibly be your great, great grandfather. He was dead.” The star then asked the ancestry expert the golden question: “But am I not a Roberts?”

In response, the Gates told her that the show’s experts had scoured through Douglas County records looking for any record that named John’s father, but found nothing. And, as it turned out, they had to turn to a different tool: DNA.

“Julia and one of her father’s first cousins, a fellow descendant of John Roberts, both agreed to take DNA tests,” Gates explained on camera. “We then compared their results to people in publicly available databases, searching for matches, hoping to identify John’s father through the DNA of his descendants.”

He added: “In the end, we found a cluster of matches that tie Julia and her cousin to one man.” The man in question was called Henry MacDonald Mitchell Jr. After reading out the name, Roberts asked: “So we’re Mitchells?” To which Gates replies: “You’re Julia Mitchell.”

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