Finding Your Roots
Synopsis
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.
Season 1 Episodes
EP 1
Their European immigrant ancestors blazed unconventional trails in America, from capturing British ships for the American Revolution to cro…
EP 2
In this episode, we feature two African American politicians from different generations and opposite backgrounds. John Lewis grew up in a s…
EP 3
What's in a name? Well, a lot, at least when it comes to piecing together your family history. For former slaves, choosing a last name was …
EP 4
What do Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have in common? They are both famous actors and both descend from prominent American families that ha…
EP 5
Pastor Rick Warren, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl and Sheik Yasir Qadhi are of three different faiths, all with complex family histories that profo…
EP 6
Many American descend from a dense soups of European ethnicities; we could call them mutts, with ancestral roots across every country in Eu…
EP 7
Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Brown University President Ruth Simmons have each climbed to the pinnacle of their profession, yet …
EP 8
The three guests in this episode are all children of first- or second-generation immigrants and share the peculiar burdens of that heritage…
EP 9
Most African Americans struggle to trace their ancestors beyond Emancipation; slavery erased names and family ties with brutal efficiency. …
EP 10
Michelle Rodriguez, Adrian Grenier and Linda Chavez all share Spanish colonial roots, yet each views their own identity very differently. I…
