Rumour Has It…
Venus Williams once observed that “rumors are more exciting than the truth.”
That’s as true today as it was back in 2001 when the American tennis great uttered that quip in reaction to unfounded allegations about her family that were circulating on social media.
While the context is markedly different, the same skepticism Williams voiced applies to rumors the celebrated American comedian and late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert has ancestral roots in the Kingston area.
You may have read or heard about the on-line posts that began circulating in the wake of the cancellation of Colbert’s popular late-night talk show on CBS. Any confusion about whether or not Stephen Colbert has Canadian ancestry seems to be rooted in his maternal ancestry.
If you venture down the rabbit hole by Googling “Stephen Colbert’s Canadian roots,” one link that likely will pop up on your screen will direct you to the website of Ancestry.com, the pay-to-view genealogical website. There you’ll find some dated – and bogus – information that claims Colbert “has not one, but two paternal relatives who lived, worked, and even passed on in the Great White North.”
That 2014 Ancestry post incorrectly claims that Colbert’s ancestor was James Quinn, a real-life young Irishman who came to Canada looking for a better life. The 1851 census for “Canada West,” (as Ontario was called in pre-Confederation times), records him working as a labourer on a Frontenac County farm.
Quinn married in the mid-1850s, and he and his wife Pamela had a daughter named Angeline. The 1861 census lists Quinn as being age 32, his wife 23. The names of the couple’s two kids – one of whom was a daughter named Angeline – don’t appear in the census; these young ’uns are referenced only as family members who are under age five. Church and municipal records from around the same time (which aren’t readily available on-line) are said to mention the children by name; however, those sources don’t provide exact birthdates or baptismal information.
The documentation related to the countless members of the Irish diaspora who came to North America in the nineteenth century is incomplete and scattered. Complicating things further for genealogical researchers is the fact the Quinn surname is as common on the Emerald Isle as rosary beads and tin whistles. Despite this, you have to wonder how and why Stephen Colbert’s family history has become so muddled. Was it an honest mistake? Shoddy research, Or was some enterprising entrepreneur trying to draw eyeballs to the certain websites? We can’t be certain.
What we do know for sure is that Stephen Colbert’s great-great-grandfather was an Illinois man named George Colbert Sr. That information became public in February 2010 when the now-defunct PBS television program Face of America profiled Colbert.
In the chronicle that host Henry Louis Gates, Jr., shared with Stephen Colbert was a message Gates that had received from the Face of America’s chief researcher John Cerny. “Colbert’s ancestry has been the most difficult to search of anyone I’ve worked on in over 30 years,” Cerney reported. “I can say that without reservation.”
What the Face of America research team also confirmed was that Colbert’s mother, Lorna Elizabeth Tuck Colbert, was born in 1920 in Larchmont, NY. Her maternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant named Andrew Tuck who’d emigrated to Canada in the 1820s. After living in the Montreal area for a few years, Tuck apparently left behind members of his extended family when he moved to New York state. Years later, some of his offspring migrated west, settling in Illinois. While there were no relatives of James Quinn living there, this was where the Colberts entered the picture.
In January 1894, almost four decades after Angeline Quinn was born in Canada, Illinois railway worker George William Colbert – who was Stephen Colbert’s great-great grandfather – wed a young woman named Angeline Garin. Apart from the fact the given name Angeline shows up among the branches of the Garin and Quinn family trees, any link between the two clans is so remote that it’s almost inconsequential. But getting back to what we do know for sure . . .
Among George and Angeline Colbert’s children was their son James. Years later, it was one of his offspring, James Colbert Jr., who was Stephen Colbert’s father. He and his wife Laura Tuck had 11 children; Stephen, born in Washinton, D.C., on May 13, 1964, was their youngest. He was raised by his mother in South Carolia when his father, who was a prominent doctor, and his two older brothers died in a 1974 plane crash.
This is the greatly simplified version of Stephen Colbert’s family history, but hopefully it provides enough detail to disprove the rumours about him having Kingston roots. You won’t see the comedian posing to have his photo taken on the steps of City Hall, even if it is easy to create an AI-generated image of him doing.
Oh, well, as Venus Williams put it, rumours are more exciting than the truth.
