Meryl Streep Family History

Mary Louise Streep, better known as the actress Meryl Streep, was born on June 22nd, 1949 to William and Mary Streep in Summit, New Jersey.  She was the oldest of their three children.  They all became actors.

Neither of their parents were actors.  But her mother who had her own art career encouraged Meryl in particular to do something creative with her life.  As a “gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair,” Meryl liked to show off in front of the camera in family home movies from a young age.

She demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines.  She earned her AB in drama at Vassar cum laude in 1971, before graduating with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Yale School of Drama four years later.

Her Acting Career.  She started out on her acting career in New York in 1975 in off-Broadway productions.

Her first successful film venture was The Deer Hunter in 1978 where she played the girlfriend to Robert De Niro.   Next came Kramer versus Kramer with Dustin Hoffman which was another commercial success.  For the latter film she won the Oscar Best Supporting Actress Award which she famously left in the ladies’ room after giving her speech.

Her 1982 performance in Sophie’s Choice won her the coveted Oscar Best Actress Award.  Out of Africa with Robert Redford followed in 1985.  She was now established as one of the finest, if not the finest, actress of her generation.

In November 2014, President Barack Obama bestowed upon Meryl Streep the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.  The citation read as follows:

“Meryl Streep is one of the most widely known and acclaimed actors in history.  Ms. Streep has captured our imaginations with her unparalleled ability to portray a wide range of roles and attract an audience that has only grown over time, portraying characters who embody the full range of the human experience.”

The Streep Side

Meryl’s Streep side is mainly German in origin – although there is a Swiss-German element in there, starting from the farming village of Giswil in central Switzerland.  Her mother’s side meanwhile are Wilkinsons and derive from early English settlers in New England.

Her DNA test revealed 100% European ancestry.  Thus the reports that she may have had Dutch Jewish ancestry appear to have been erroneous.

German Antecedants.  The Streeps were originally Streeb and originated in Germany.   The Streeb or variant Streib surname are not that common there and occur mainly in Baden-Wurttemberg.  The names derive from the German word strib meaning “strive” or “struggle” and may describe an ambitious or striving person.

Meryl’s own Streeb ancestry has been traced back to a Johann Jakob Streeb who was born in Loffenau, Wurttemberg around the year 1608.  A Johann Georg Streeb was its mayor in the 1730’s.  Loffenau was and is a small mountain village in the northern part of the Black Forest with some 1,200 inhabitants in the mid-19th century.

It may have been poverty or political unrest which caused Gottfried Streeb – born at Loffenau in 1815 – to emigrate to America in 1850.  He became Godfrey Streep in the process.  He married Christina Zeltmann, also from Loffenau, in New York in 1851.

New Jersey as Home.  Godfrey and Christina settled in New Jersey and would be the parents of eleven children.  Godfrey worked for the Rankin Roofing Company in Elizabeth, Union county.   He and his family lived in employee housing there on Elizabeth Avenue.

The 1880 census recorded the family as follows:

• Godfrey Streep, head of household, aged 65
• Christina Streep, wife, aged 48
• William Streep, son, laborer, aged 20
• Godfrey Streep, son, oysterman, aged 17
• plus five younger children (Elizabeth, John, Charles, Rose and Annie).

Their eldest son Frederic, aged 23, had left home by that time.  He had moved to Newark where he worked as a clerk and then as a driver.  He married his wife Lizzie in 1881 and they had four children.

Harry, born in 1884, was their eldest.  He too worked as a clerk and then as a bartender and travelling salesman.  In 1908 he married Helena Huber, the daughter of a Swiss immigrant who had done well by selling ice to saloons and grocery stores in New Jersey.

Harry would later find steady work at the US employment service in Clifton, New Jersey and moved out with his family to Madison in Morris county.

His son Harry Jr, also known as Buddy, did better.  After graduating from Madison High School, he attended college at Brown and Rutgers.  He then became a pharmaceutical executive for Merck and Co. based in Rahway, New Jersey.  It was said that he lived a calm and private life, focused on work and family.

In 1976 at the age of sixty-seven he could comfortably retire.  He and his wife Mary left New Jersey for their retirement home on Masons Island in Stonington, Connecticut.  He died in 2003 at the goodly age of ninety-five.

So – not much creative or artistic talent on this side of the family!

The Wilkinson Side

Mery’s mother was a Wilkinson.  Their line is English and goes back to the early settlements in America.

Early Wilkinsons.  The forebear of these Wilkinsons was Lawrence Wilkinson from Durham who arrived in New England around 1645 and settled in Rhode Island.  He and his descendants were first in Providence and then in that part of Providence that became Scituate.

John Wilkinson of Meryl’s line migrated from Rhode Island to the rural township of Wrightstown in Bucks county, Pennsylvania sometime around 1713.  “At this time the primeval forests tenanted with savages and wild beasts covered the land and his neighbors were few and far between.”

Wrightstown had from early times a Quaker meetingplace.  Though the township was and remains small, it has a historic significance as being George Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War.

The Wilkinson line in Wrightstown went as follows::

• John Wilkinson (1749-1778) m. Jane Chapman
• Abraham Wilkinson (1772-1816) m. Mary Twining
• Samuel Wilkinson (1810-1867) m. Julia Simpson

John Wilkinson was a Quaker and a Justice of the Peace in Wrightstown.  At a Quaker house meeting in 1777, he took the controversial position of supporting the American rebels against the British Government.  He has been remembered positively:

“John was a thorough-going business man, influential and respected in his neighborhood.  It is not an infrequent thing to hear old men speak of John Wilkinson Esq. as being one of the most active and influential men of his day.  Notwithstanding that he was so much engaged in public affairs, his private business was well attended to.  He accumulated a large estate, most of which was in land.”

The Wilkinsons of Meryl’s line remained in Wrightstown for three generations.  Samuel, the third of these Wilkinsons, was recorded in town minutes as settling in new land beyond the stream in Wrightstown in 1833.

Later Wilkinsons.  Samuel’s son Eleazer became the secretary of a match company and moved from Wrightstown to Philadelphia.

His son William Rockafellow had been born in 1882 in Wrightstown, but married Mary Agnes Wolf in Brooklyn, New York.  There is an Irish connection here through Mary Wolf’s mother Mary McFadden.  She came with her parents to America from Donegal in 1864.

William and his wife raised three children in New Jersey, including their daughter Mary born in 1915.

Mary Streep nee Wilkinson.  Meryl’s mother Mary, born in Brooklyn, grew up in Madison, New Jersey.  She graduated from Madison High School and then studied Fine Art at the Art Students League in New York.

She became the art editor for Home Furnishings magazine, as well as doing commercial artwork on an freelance basis.  She had an art studio at the back of her home.

She married Harry Streep in 1940, but their first child, Meryl Streep, did not come until after World War Two in 1949.  Meryl has said that her mother, whom she thought looked like the English actress Judi Dench, was a strong influence on her, instilling confidence in her from a very young age.

“She was a mentor because she said to me: ‘Meryl, you’re capable.  You’re so great.  You can do whatever you put your mind to.  If you’re lazy, you’re not going to get it done.  But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.’  And I believed her.”

When Streep met Redford

The film Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, opened in 1985 and won seven Academy Awards, including that for Best Picture.  The film was based on the autobiography of the Danish writer Karen Blixen (played by Meryl) and described her life and adventures In the Kenyan Highlands during the early 1900’s.

Robert Redford then was thirteen years older than Meryl and the biggest male film star around.  Meryl at that time was just establishing herself as a leading female actress.  But on set there was the potential for conflict between the two.

Conflict?  Robert considered himself a natural and not a studied actor.  He would not change his speaking accent from America to English just because he was playing an English big game hunter (in the event it worked out OK).

But Meryl would be meticulous in getting the right Danish accent for her time and class.  And she would practice her scenes to ensure that they would all be true to her character.  Would the two of them mesh?

Then there were the aggravations.

The production in Kenya lasted more than three months.  Cast and crew endured intense, scorching heat, followed by sudden, violent storms and torrential rains which at one time nearly caused the whole project to shut down.  There were snakes and insects to contend with.  Many crew members contracted malaria.

And then there was the wildlife.  Production was constantly surrounded by lions, elephants, and buffalo.  In one notable scene where Meryl’s character fights off a lion with a whip, she was told that the animal would be tethered.  However, the lion was actually unrestrained and came dangerously close to her.  Her visible fear came through in the scene.

But There Was Chemistry.  Yet despite all these problems the chemistry between Redford and Streep is clear to see in this movie.  One of its most lasting images is Redford washing Streep’s hair in a South African river.  In 2024 Meryl confessed that this was her favorite love scene in her career.

In the 2019 book Queen Meryl, Redford recounted that their connection was so strong that it irked the director Sydney Pollack during the filming. “It caused ripples. We liked to talk.  And we’d be off-camera, between takes, taking it easy.”

Meryl Streep’s Family Tree

• Meryl Streep with actor John Cazale (1935-1978) until his death from lung cancer.  She rem. sculptor Don Gummer (b. 1946) in 1978, separated in 2018
• – Henry Wolf Gummer (1979), musician, m. Tamlyn Hawker
• – Mary (Mamie) Gummer (b. 1983), actress, m. Benjamin Walker and Mehar Sethi
• – Grace Gummer (b. 1986), actress, m. Tay Strathairn and Mark Ronson
• – Louisa Gummer (b. 1991), actress, lesbian