Finding Your Roots



Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the full title of this PBS documentary series exploring the genealogy of various celebrity guests, usually Americans. In addition to paper records, they use DNA testing to try to determine relationships. It's a full service research show, unlike others of the genre, and surprisingly often comes up with details about a family like the name of a slave ancestor who came from Africa.

The way it turns into a tropable show, really, is because of how tantalizingly incomplete records of the past are. Guests are left to imagine what the lives of their ancestors were, and often do opine about the relationships. Also, as it's run by a historian, each show pairs different guests in an effort to tell universal stories, such as those of missing parents or immigration from poverty.

The host, Dr. Skip Gates, also has some notoriety for being a party in Barack Obama's famous "Beer Summit".


 * Born Into Slavery: When presented with a copy of the 1860 census, which lists slaves by age and gender only, the show will always make a point that that four year old boy or fifteen year old girl was a slave.
 * Highlighted Text: Uses this device to emphasize relevant potions of the various historical documents it has uncovered during its searches when displaying to the viewership what Gates is presenting to the guests.
 * The Holocaust: Yep, it happened.
 * Immigrant Parents: Since this is a show about Americans, every show eventually has some immigrants. Often, they are the focus of the show, explaining some disaster or other in Europe they were fleeing.
 * In the Blood: Certainly we care about genetics, but quite a few guests came from generations of entertainers, or generations of fashion designers -- that sort of thing -- that matches what the modern guest is famous for. This even happens across adoptions or missing parents, so there must be some level of genetic affect there.
 * Parental Abandonment/Disappeared Dad/Missing Mom: Often why the guests want to come on the show, to see if a pro can find the rest of their family.
 * Royal Blood: If the records go back far enough, they inevitably join one of Europe's royal families as a distant cadet branch. So every once in a while, you get a guest who can trace lineage back to Charlemagne.  Of course, if you have any European ancestry, mathematics dictates that you are a descendant of Charlemagne and every other person before 1000 AD with living offspring.
 * Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: At the end of each show, the guest is shown any other previous guests on the show they are distantly related to, based on a section or two of identical DNA. Of course, one of the previous guests of the show was Kevin Bacon.  And in one case, a guest turned out to be a distant cousin of Gates himself.
 * Streisand Effect: When Ben Affleck was a guest, he told them that he didn't want them to air anything about his slaveholding ancestors, because it was embarrassing. And of course, we're talking about it here.