"Finding Your Roots" -- A TV series on PBS that's worth watching

In Finding Your Roots, historian Hank Gates traces the geneaology of myriad individuals from entertainment, politics, business, sports, etc. Gates and his team of researchers use a mix of oral tradition, vital records, newspaper articles, war records, and DNA analysis to develop the family trees of his guests.

Often enough his guests are celebs whom one may have heard of, but equally often they are folks names may conjure zero recognition. Either way, however, each story is poignantly unique and similarly common. For example (and I regret I don't recall the names of each of situation I'm about to describe), one guest was a direct descendant of Charlemagne and another from Abraham. (Yes, "that" Abraham.) Gates traced the ancestry of one woman back to the early period of the ancient Chinese empire; she's a direct descendant of some long gone emperor. Ming Tsai's lineage was traced to 891 A.D. As fate would have it, of all the stele that were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, his family's is the only one that remains, and on it is found Ming's 30-somethingth great grandfather.

As Gates presents his guests' ancestry, he also provides rich historical context and information about what was going on in the times and places in which their ancestors lived. In those tales one sees multiple facets of richness that's shared among all us Americans. Gates describes little known details of history that spurred his guests' ancestors to emigrate all that was familiar to them to come to America and forge new beginnings. He recounts details about battles one never heard of in wars and paints the picture of how those events, ones too small to merit mention in yours and my history texts, shaped events.

Sometimes even, the details Gates unfolds provide useful information that can give one perspective about their own family's history. For instance, I watched the episode having Dustin Hoffman in it. One of Hoffman's ancestors fled the Russian Revolution as a refugee, but not being able to obtain entry to the U.S., fled to Argentina, which, it turns out, was, at the time, a popular alternative. Seeing that about Hoffman reminded me of an acquaintance from Montevideo whom I knew was of Russian descent.

I emailed her to ask if she knew about the diaspora from Russia to Uruguay and Argentina. Turns out she didn't. Her parents had never really talked about her grandparents. She called me back to tell me how grateful she was. That tip allowed her to look into it more, and over the course of some months a whole new world was opened up to her.

She travelled to Russia and several other countries and discovered relatives who are still there and in other parts of Europe and was able to fill in many of the blanks about her family history. Last we spoke, she'd traced her family back to the 15th century. It's, of course, became something she can share with her daughter, something she otherwise may never have known to look for or even where to start because her grandfather had fled alone and there was nobody on her Uruguayan side who knew a thing about him.

Another thing that seems pretty common is that a lot of folks come from families that didn't discuss much about their ancestors. Sometimes it seems they didn't because their own parents didn't know. Other times it's apparent that someone's ancestor was "black sheep" and nobody wanted to tell his/her tale. Indeed, that seems a surprisingly common thing. Many of the stories I've watched involved the tale of blacks' and whites' having forefathers/-mothers who committed the "sin" of miscegenation, for instance. Other stories reveal a distant great grandparent who was a felon, weasel or other such ne'er do well. Equally as often, however, the ancestor is quite Jean Valjean-esque, as it were.

Watch the show for whatever reason -- the history, to learn a bit more about a celeb one admires, or to get ideas about how to trace one's own ancestry. Regardless of why one watches it I think one will find something touching and informative in it. Migrations across continents, oceans or even in the U.S. and colonies. It's amazing just what people endured to become Americans. While the show tells the stories of individuals, what's most compelling to me is how the journeys of Gates' guests' ancestors tell the story, really the many stories, of America at a level of detail that won't elsewhere be found.

I just finished watching a DVR'd episode of the program. The two individuals whose ancestry is revealed are Michael Strahan and S. Epatha Merkerson (Law and Order viewers may recognize her name; I don't watch that show).

I turns out that this guy....




...is the 39th great grandfather of this guy...



Strahan is the second or third person who's appeared on the show and who's descended directly from Charlemagne.


Turns out too that a small town in TX, Shankleville, was founded by his Black ancestors just five years after receiving emancipation.


While the lineage of the various guests on the show has some degree of novelty, what I like most about the show is the history, US and foreign, that it tells. For instance, in the "Strahan" episode, I learned, among other things, that there was a phenomenon called the "Second Middle Passage."

In Gate's relating Merkerson's ancestry, I found out that around the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, Maryland's tobacco industry slumped dramatically. A couple decades later, that slump resulted in, among other things, the Jesuits running Georgetown University, a Jesuit community begun in the early 1600s by Jesuits who then fled Jesuit/Catholic persecution in England (see also: The Age Of Reformation And Counter-Reformation), to sell ~275 slaves (for $115K in 1830s) in order to sustain the institution. The sale of the slaves occurred in the 1830s and had to be and was approved by the Pope/Vatican; it yielded the modern equivalent of ~$3.3M to ~$7M. Georgetown recently apologized for the sale. It also named one of its buildings after one of those slaves, Isaac Hawkins, who, it turns out, is Merkerson's direct ancestor.

What's the "cool" part of Merkerson's story? Well it reveals that Georgetown U. exists, in part, because Henry VIII wanted a new wife and couldn't get an annulment from the Pope, which led Elizabethan era Jesuits to flea to the New World. The community of Georgetown U. Jesuits somehow came to own a slave who gave birth to children and eventually, Merkerson was born and appears before millions as part of the cast of Law and Order, and now there's a building that commemorates Isaac, Merkerson's ancestor, and the remainder of the slaves with whom he was sold. All that was brought about, set in motion because Henry VIII essentially wanted some "strange."