Henry Louis Gates Jr. On Finding White People's Surprising Black Roots

Finding Your Roots is my favorite show on television. I wish there were new episodes every night.

Wow. I didn't grow up with my Father's family, but I learned 25 years ago that the Owens side of the family descended from free black people. So, when the Finding Your Roots episode aired on Queen Latifah aka Dana Owens, and discussed the Owens side of the family, they were discussing my family too! We are 4th cousins and the same age, our birthdays are days apart!

Dr. Gate's show should be a mandatory history and science course for middle and high schoolers because the show teaches history and science and can go along way in tearing down the racial divide. If schools can't teach all of our nation's history anymore, Dr. Gate's show is a great substitute.

My favorite was actor Ty Burell finding out that he had, as he put it, a "badass" Black great-grandmother who moved to the Oregon Territory & ran her own farm.

I absolutely love your show. My mother has dementia, but remembers that she wants to watch your show. We try not to miss it.

I always suspected my maternal family had African roots because of their coloring and their lips (which I always wished I had inherited) and after many years of mine and my cousins exploring our DNA we found that our family was not only of Iberian roots but also from the Bantu (I was very proud)! Our ancestors were world travelers! I love this show because it shows we are all related and brothers and sisters.

Recognition flows both ways: when my father was dting 40 years ago and Vanessa Williams was crowned Miss America, he said she looked Finnish. We thought it was the pain meds kicking in but then years later it came out she was 12% Finnish. I wished I could go back in time and believe what he said instead of dismissing it!

My white family "passed" as Native American. When I called my mother with our DNA results and told her there was no Native American DNA, she said immediately, "Are we African? "

Joe Manganiello was one of the most fascinating segments you have done, and that is saying a lot! I am so glad you are doing a follow up piece on him! This is my favorite show.

Love it! When I was doing regular family genealogy research I found that my grandmother had lied to everyone. She was NOT slightly olive complected because of a distant Native American ancestor. She was the descendant of a house slave's daughter that had been formally adopted by the wife and husband who owned the Yager Plantation in Alabama. That was over 200 years ago. My dad gets very dark when he is exposed to the sun, but otherwise has German-Irish features. I have blond hair and blue eyes (like my mother and my father's paternal grandmother) with skin so white I cannot tan. I only burn and peal if I am exposed to the sun for too long. Given that my mother and I are not racist, but my father and many of his side of the family are, it brought me great pleasure to rub it in his face that he has relatively recent African-American ancestry. Pure Joy seeing reports like this.

Oh lord, grandma went to the pool hall...😂

Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. What he has done is a public good, helping us to understand our true history and ourselves in all our glorious diversity, both beautiful and painful!

I love his show. As a black man, I've always been interested in family history as it's always harder for us to know our history because of slavery but also because the older people in the family who would know the history refused to talk about it, and now most of them have past away. Watching this show was what got me to do the AncestryDNA test as I was already using the site for my family tree. I found out that both sides of my family go back to Great Britain/Ireland and Europe and that my 3rd great-grandfather on my mom's side was the slave owner of my 2nd and his mother, but also that as much as it could be possible that there was some kind of relationship between them because my 2nd great-grandfather was named after the owner his father and I can't imagine his mother doing that let alone the owner being ok with her doing it if there wasn't some kind of relationship between them. I also found out that on my dad's side not only did our family go back to Great Britain/Ireland and Europe but also to India.

You need to do a "Finding Your Roots" show about the "Finding Your Roots" show. Show all of the methods, and to what lengths you go to, get to their roots. I would find the really fascinating.

Way to go Professor Gates. From a former Harvard student.👍

I love this show, along with some of the others that help people find their ancestors. Everyone should be involved in their family history. It is enlightening and inspiring all at the same time. We are all one family - one race. Human race. The division and animosity are all man made.

My favorite was Joe Madison’s🕊️For starters, he wasn’t a Madison. Then found out he was descended from a a white Confederate POW that later took up with and had children with a Black woman. That relationship lasted for many years. And an aside, he was descended from a Revolutionary War soldier, executed desertion. It was a lot going on in his tree. Plus, Angela Davis, a Mayflower descendent. That was a shocker knowing that she was a “Blue Blood”.

I am an avid watcher and fan of this show. Now, I have my daughter tuning in to see it. Fascinating and interesting how DNA works! Love it!

We are all connected.

My family is white with no known black ancestry but my brother's dentist has told him he shares dental characteristics he sees in his black patients. Since archeologists have determined humanity, as we know it, began in Africa I assume we are all descendant from black people, at one time or another. So, we really are related to each other in the genetic pool.