From AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES (2006) through the first season of FINDING YOUR ROOTS (2012), 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.
Joining Gates in this new season of FINDING YOUR ROOTS will be a diverse group of guests, including Oscar winner Ben Affleck, award winning journalist Anderson Cooper, tennis great Billie Jean King, legendary author Stephen King, multi-platinum selling rapper Nas, and many more. With these guests and others, Gates continues his quest to understand our collective American identity, bringing to life the family histories of African American, Asian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latin American guests alike.
Share Your Story
Every family has a unique genealogical journey, just waiting to be unlocked. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks you to share your own story!
Over 10 episodes (Tuesdays, September 23 - November 26, 2014), the series will reveal rich family stories, tracing back to the subjects’ ancestors arrival on America’s shores, and beyond: deep into the history of their countries of origin. Each hour will highlight three guests bound together by an intimate, sometimes hidden link, as Gates treks through layers of ancestral history, uncovers secrets and surprises of their family trees and shares life-altering discoveries.
Episode Four: "Roots Of Freedom" airs Tuesday, October 14 at 8 p.m. - Three guests whose families have long been engaged in the battle for freedom and civil rights but who had no idea that those principles were passed down through generations of ancestors; Ben Affleck’s mother was a Freedom Rider in 1964 and her roots include the 19th century spiritualist Almon French, who attempted to heal the bereaved masses in the aftermath of the Civil War; Benjamin Jealous, former president of the NAACP, learns the heroic story of his great-grandfather, Peter G. Morgan, a free black man who was forced to purchase his own wife and family in order to keep them safe; and actress Khandi Alexander, who never knew who her grandfather was and learned that he may have been murdered in the Jim Crow South. All three guests discover they have patriot ancestors who fought valiantly for freedom in the American Revolution.
NEXT WEEK: "The Melting Pot" episode features Tom Colicchio, Aarón Sánchez and Ming Tsai
Past episodes are available for online viewing. FINDING YOUR ROOTS is on Facebook, and you can follow @HenryLouisGates on Twitter.
Ben Affleck's Mystical Ancestor
"Ben Affleck learns of his 3rd Great-Grandfather
Khandi Alexander's Family Tragedy
Khandi Alexander's ambitious Grandfather met a tragic end when he was purposefully burned while working as a distiller at a rosin factory -- what amounted to a workplace lynching.
The Jealous Family Freedom Papers
"Benjamin Jealous discovers his family's first freed ancestor
Roots of Freedom Promo
"Ben Affleck
Share Your Story Prompt
"Henry Louis Gates
