By Mary Ellen Wright
If family lore and the online genealogical records my relatives and I have been able to piece together are reasonably accurate, I have some colorful stories hidden in the branches of my family tree.
If family lore and the online genealogical records my relatives and I have been able to piece together are reasonably accurate, I have some colorful stories hidden in the branches of my family tree.
From what I’ve learned so far, my ancestry apparently includes war heroes and scalawags, blue bloods and moonshiners, people who thrived in the New World’s earliest settlements and ancestors who came to desperate ends in the Old World.
It’s funny how I tend to embrace the heroes, imagining their blood flowing in my veins, while I have so much trouble coming to terms with stories of my slave-owning ancestors and other notorious characters in my family’s past. I view them almost like fictional tales that don’t really have a connection to my life.
I get to watch celebrities experience the very same thing every week on one of my favorite TV shows, “Finding Your Roots.”
Each Tuesday night on PBS, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces the ancestry of two or three well-known actors, musicians, comedians, TV stars, authors or government officials, helping them uncover secrets hidden in their family stories — and even in their own DNA.
The celebrities gasp or wipe away tears as they turn the pages of their “book of life” — a scrapbook of photos, archival records and newspaper clippings Gates gives each guest. They learn the show’s researchers have traced their roots back to King Charlemagne, or to the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia.
The DNA tests they’ve allowed Gates’ researchers to conduct might show they have Native American relatives, or tell them in which part of Africa their ancestors lived.
Like me and my relatives, these celebrities marvel at the coincidences and incongruities found in their ancestors’ journeys through life.
Earlier this season on “Finding Your Roots,” actor Bill Hader giggled as he found brave war heroes on his family tree, admitting they possessed the courage he lacks. “Modern Family’s” Ty Burrell was clearly moved to learn he is descended from both a slave owner and a slave.
Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette learned she had a Civil War soldier in her ancestry. The Civil War memorabilia of her grandfather, comedian Cliff (“Charley Weaver”) Arquette, was the founding collection of what eventually became the Soldiers National Museum in Gettysburg.
Political opposites Bill Maher and Bill O’Reilly sarcastically embraced the news that they’re distantly related.
The program often teaches me something new about world history. Through the examination of celebrity chef Lydia Bastianich’s ancestry on Tuesday’s show, for example, I learned about the post-World War II “Istrian exodus,” in which Italians fled the Istrian Peninsula when it was taken over by Yugoslavia.
I think the most moving “Finding Your Roots” episode so far came a couple of weeks ago, when actor and rapper LL Cool J learned that the grandparents he’d spent a lot of time with weren’t his biological relatives.
Through DNA testing and a serendipitous “hit” in a genealogy database, the actor’s mother learned she had been adopted, and who her birth parents were.
LL Cool J, a big boxing fan, found out his biological grandfather was boxer Nathaniel Christy Lewis, brother of hall-of-fame pugilist John Henry Lewis.
By the end of the episode, the actor and his mother were laughing and talking with cousins they’d never known they had. This story of these hidden roots unearthed was more dramatic than any episode of “NCIS: Los Angeles,” the show on which LL Cool J stars, could ever be.
I’m glad “Finding Your Roots” wasn’t slowed down by the Ben Affleck controversy, in which the actor apparently convinced the program not to have Gates mention he had slave-owners in his family tree.
“Finding Your Roots” is a descendant itself, of Gates’s two previous PBS genealogy programs, “African-American Lives” and “Faces of America.” On the latter show, talk-show host Stephen Colbert learned he had farming ancestors who settled in 18th-century Lancaster County.
My family is, I think, pretty typical in the way my parents passed down the stories of our ancestors. There were proudly told stories of hard-working immigrants opening their own store, along with sordid tales of murder and mayhem in the Deep South that my father was hesitant to share.
“Finding Your Roots” helps its celebrity guests separate fact from fiction in their family lore, and fascinates and entertains the rest of us in the process.
I only wish I had Gates’ access to archivists and scientists, to fuel my family’s own, continuing genealogical journey.
Staff writer Mary Ellen Wright welcomes email at mwright@lnpnews.com. You can learn more about the ancestors on her family tree at bit.ly/LNPFamilyTree. “Finding Your Roots” airs at 8 p.m. Tuesdays on WITF. Unscripted is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.
