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.
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!
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.
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 Three: "Our American Storytellers" airs Tuesday, October 7 at 8 p.m. - Three iconic American storytellers who have spent their lives chronicling the lives of others all the while knowing almost nothing about their own family history: Ken Burns confronts the reality of his southern ancestors’ role in the Civil War, including Confederate soldiers who were held captive and a slave-owning Virginian; Anderson Cooper, the scion of one of America’s most storied families, the Vanderbilts, longs to know more about his father’s Southern roots, including the story of an ancestor murdered by one his slaves; and Anna Deavere Smith learns the epic story of her great-grandfather, Basil Biggs, a free black man and former conductor on the Underground Railroad. All three guests’ ancestors intersect at the most pivotal moments of American history.
NEXT WEEK: "Roots of Freedom" episode features Ben Affleck, Khandi Alexander and Benjamin Jealous.
Past episodes are available for online viewing. FINDING YOUR ROOTS is on Facebook, and you can follow @HenryLouisGates on Twitter. You can follow @BillieJeanKing on Twitter. Derek Jeter is on Facebook. Follow @RebeccaLobo on Twitter.
Our American Storytellers Promo
Three iconic American storytellers who have spent their lives chronicling the lives of others all the while knowing almost nothing about their own family history.
