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 Five: "The Melting Pot" airs Tuesday, October 21 at 8 p.m. - Three celebrity chefs who cook the food of their ancestors discover family members who have shaped their lives--and America’s cuisine. TOP CHEF’S Tom Colicchio learns the hardships his family endured living in a tiny town in Northern Italy and celebrates the courage of his original immigrant ancestor, a man who crossed the Atlantic multiple times to bring the Colicchios to the United States; Ming Tsai, the child of immigrants who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution, was raised to believe that his family’s Chinese past was obliterated by the Communists but finds instead that his roots can be traced back over 2000 years, yielding the largest family tree we’ve ever seen; and Aarón Sánchez discovers that his family’s treasured Mexican roots include people who were Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans.
Taken together, the stories of these guests show how the U.S.’s great diversity has given rise to three of our greatest cuisines and indeed infuses every aspect of American life.
NEXT WEEK: "We Come From People" episode features Angela Bassett, Valerie Jarrett and Nas.
Past episodes are available for online viewing. FINDING YOUR ROOTS is on Facebook, and you can follow @HenryLouisGates on Twitter.
Tom Colicchio's Ideal Family Dinner
"An award-winning chef
Ming Tsai's Ancestral Homeland
"When the award-winning chef Ming Tsai's paternal grandparents Stephen Tsai and Lily Li fled the Chinese Communist Revolution
Aarón Sánchez's Revolutionary Roots
"Chef Aarón Sánchez learns how his great-great-grandfather Rafael
The Melting Pot Promo
"Celebrity chefs Tom Colicchio
Share Your Story Prompt
"Henry Louis Gates
