Mary Louise Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1949.
But we know her as the successful actor/singer Meryl Streep who’s won 29 Golden Globe awards.
She also won 3 Academy Awards and was nominated for an astounding 19 – more than any other actor or actress.
But who is the woman behind the silver screen persona?
Streep’s Surprising DNA Test Results
When Henry Louis Gates Jr. invited Streep onto his PBS program Faces of America, he tested her DNA.
Streep and Gates were both surprised by her DNA test results. Streep believed her family to be of Sephardic Jewish and Dutch ancestry.
She’d once received a family history of a Streep family who were Jews in England that had gone there from Holland.
So what did her DNA results show? Was she in fact part Jewish?
When her DNA test, which measured her ancestry over about the last five hundred years, came back, it showed she is 100 percent European. But there’s more to the story.
A Colorful Family History
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his team did further genealogical research, to learn more about her family story.
They found Streep is descended from people who lived in small towns in Germany and Switzerland and from Quakers who were among the very first to settle in America.
On her father’s side, she was connected, ten generations back, to a family named Streeb (spelled with a “b” not a “p” at that time) of Loffenau, Germany.
Meryl Related to Eva Longoria, Stephen Colbert
Gates also found that Streep shares DNA, and therefore recent ancestry, with German-American director Mike Nichols and American actress Eva Longoria.
And her DNA is an extremely close match with American comedian Stephen Colbert. She and Colbert, she was excited to learn, share a huge stretch of identical DNA.
“Isn’t that wild?! We’re practically the same person,” she joked. “That is a thrill.”
What’s Your Story?
Those of us who don’t catch Gates’s eye can learn more about our family histories by taking an AncestryDNA test.
The test maps your ethnicity going back multiple generations and helps narrow down what world regions your ancestors came from.
Results include information about close DNA matches – your own Stephen Colbert’s – who may be related to you.
What secrets will you uncover by taking an AncestryDNA test?