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Celebritrees: Halle Berry | |
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Mixing It Up
The lovely and well-paid Halle Berry—recently visible on big screens and small as Catwoman, a Bond girl and a makeup model—delivered that
tearful "this moment is so much bigger than me" speech in 2002, after winning the first Oscar awarded to an African-American actress. Berry's mixed heritage
is well-known: She's said, "I don't see a white woman. I see a black woman, even though my mother is white."
Although Berry sees herself as African-American, knowing her mother's European heritage was a genealogical advantage for me. I reached back 12 generations
and found lots of links to a variety of famous folk. Through John Perkins, an early-1600s settler of Ipswich, Mass., Berry can count actors Richard Gere
and Montgomery Clift among her 10th cousins once removed (for the juicy details on Gere's ancestry, see the December 2004 Family Tree Magazine.)
The same colonial ancestor makes her a ninth cousin twice removed to playwright Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams and a sixth cousin four times removed
to 13th US President Millard Fillmore.
Unlike in modern times, though, people tended to hide mixed heritage during our ancestors' era—which could make your research more difficult. If
everything else about a suspected ancestor looks right, but the ethnicity is "wrong," dig deeper. You might make a brick-wall breakthrough—and feel
as though you've won a genealogical Oscar. Better start writing that acceptance speech.
Florida genealogist Rhonda R. McClure is the author of Finding Your Famous (& Infamous) Ancestors (Betterway Books, $12.99).
For more real stories of found ancestors, see the February 2005 Family Tree Magazine.
By Rhonda R. McClure
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