Finding Your Roots
Season 1
TV-PG
Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.
10 Episodes
- Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.
E1Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.Actor and musician Harry Connick, Jr. and legendary jazz musician Branford Marsalis share their love of jazz and New Orleans itself, but they both also have European immigrant ancestors who blazed unconventional trails in America. - Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada
E3Barbara Walters and Geoffrey CanadaProf. Gates unearths missing links in the family histories of legendary broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, and equally notable activist and educator Geoffrey Canada, as they try to learn the original last names of their fathers. - Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi
E5Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir QadhiFamily roots of Baptist evangelical Christian megachurch founder, pastor Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian-American Rabbi, and American Muslim scholar Yasir Qadhi unearth a story about the spiritual foundations of America. - Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal
E6Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie GyllenhaalMany American descend from a dense soups of European ethnicities; we could call them mutts, with ancestral roots across every country in Europe. Actors Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal are textbook examples of Americans with a rich tapestry of European immigrant stories making up their family trees. We delve in to their deep American roots in early colonial communities, and we meet their Eastern European Jewish ancestors, who share almost identical migration stories From the Mayflower to Ellis Island, we journey through centuries of immigration that shaped and built our melting pot nation. - Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons
E7Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth SimmonsSamuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Brown University President Ruth Simmons have each climbed to the pinnacle of their profession, yet each started life as a second class citizen in the Jim Crow south. In this episode we will use DNA to investigate family mysteries: where do they come from in Africa, and who are the white men in their family trees? - Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta
E8Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay GuptaThe three guests in this episode are all children of first- or second-generation immigrants and share the peculiar burdens of that heritage. In an episode that crisscrosses the planet, from India to Korea to Poland, catch a glimpse of three distinct yet oddly overlapping experiences of families leaving their homes and becoming American.
