Jennifer Hudson, for all her stardom, comes from relatively humble beginnings – but her family might have been way more exciting than we thought. For those who aren’t up to date on their music history, Jennifer Hudson was rocketed to fame after she was a finalist on the third season of American Idol. Before that, she and her two siblings was raised in Chicago by their mother. Even though her father wasn’t in the picture, Hudson went looking for him at age 14. During the process, she found out that she didn’t just have two siblings: instead, her father had 27 children, and Jennifer Hudson’s on a mission to meet them all.
Jennifer Hudson Dreamed About Big Family Dinners With Her 27 Siblings
Jennifer Hudson was born in 1981 in Chicago as the youngest child of Darnell Donerson and Samuel Simpson, a Greyhound bus driver. The talk show host and her siblings, Julia and Jason, were raised by their mother until age 14, when Jennifer set out to find her absent father. What she found, however, was the kind of realization that shook her to her foundations. Her father had been very busy along his bus routes because rather than the two siblings Jennifer Hudson had grown up with, she had 27 half-siblings on her father’s side.
Hudson first revealed her discovery to the press back in April, but she recently sat down with People and discussed her journey to reunite her entire family, no matter how unexpectedly big it was.
“It was my dream to have all of us at this grand Thanksgiving or Christmas table, and we all sit and eat together — that was my goal at 16.”
Jennifer Hudson/People
In the same interview, Hudson explained that while she’s never met all of her nearly thirty half-siblings, she has found six or seven. While some of the credit for tracking down her long-lost siblings goes to Jennifer Hudson’s status as a public figure, she also attributed some of it to her father’s side of the family, where some of the siblings she’s already connected with have begun to connect with more of the 27. Every time a new one is found, her dream of family dinners gets one step closer to being a reality.
