Finding Your Roots (2012)
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.
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Episode 1 - In Search of our Fathers
Release Date: 2014-09-23Three famous guests — Stephen King, Gloria Reuben and Courtney B. Vance — know almost nothing about their fathers’ histories.
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Episode 2 - Born Champions
Release Date: 2014-09-30Billie Jean King, Derek Jeter and Rebecca Lobo learn about their family histories. King discovers that her grandmother was an orphan; Derek Jeter investigates his ancestors' lives as slaves; and Lobo finds out that an ancestor was forced to flee Spain because of his democratic ideals.
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Episode 3 - Our American Storytellers
Release Date: 2014-10-07Ken Burns learns that his Southern ancestors include Confederate soldiers and a slave owner; Anderson Cooper learns that an ancestor on his father's side was killed by one of his slaves; and Anna Deavere Smith learns about her great-grandfather, who was a free black man and former conductor on the Underground Railroad.
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Episode 4 - Roots of Freedom
Release Date: 2014-10-14Actor Ben Affleck discovers his mother's past as a Freedom Rider in 1964, NAACP President Ben Jealous learns how far his great-grandfather would go to keep his family whole, and actress Khandi Alexander learns about her grandfather's death. This episode is not available from pbs because actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. In the investigation, PBS said that producers violated network standards by letting Mr. Affleck have “improper influence” and “by failing to inform PBS or WNET of Mr. Affleck’s efforts to affect program content.”
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Episode 5 - The Melting Pot
Release Date: 2014-10-21Chef Tom Colicchio learns the hardships his family endured in Northern Italy; chef Ming Tsai traces his roots back 2,000 years; chef Aarón Sánchez learns his Mexican roots include Spaniards, Africans and Native Americans.
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Episode 6 - We Come From People
Release Date: 2014-10-28Nas learns about his slave ancestors; Angela Bassett discovers that her family history includes an emancipation story; and Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, learns about the free people of color in her family's past
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Episode 7 - Our People, Our Traditions
Release Date: 2014-11-04Tony Kushner learns how the Holocaust impacted his ancestors; Carole King delves into the origins of her family name; and Alan Dershowitz discovers that an Hassidic synagogue started by his great-grandfather played a secret role in World War II.
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Episode 8 - The British Invasion
Release Date: 2014-11-11Deepak Chopra, Sally Field and Sting’s ancestry demonstrates the extraordinary influence of the British Empire during the 18th and early 19th century.
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Episode 9 - Ancient Roots
Release Date: 2014-11-18Tina Fey, George Stephanopoulos and David Sedaris, three quintessential voices in American life, descend from ancestors that were part of the wave of Greek immigrants that flooded America’s shores in the early decades of the 20th century.
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Episode 10 - Decoding Our Past Through DNA
Release Date: 2014-11-25Secrets encoded in their genomes challenge these guests’ ideas about their families’ histories and their identities today. This episode features Jessica Alba, Anderson Cooper, Valerie Jarrett, Governor Deval Patrick and more.