Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns to ThinkTV at 9pm Monday, March 26, for the new series, Finding Your Roots. In this 10-part series, Gates journeys deep into the ancestry of a group of remarkable individuals and provides new understanding of personal identity and American history.
Professor Gates is an Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Continuing on the quest begun in his previous projects – African American Lives (2006), African American Lives 2 (2008) and Faces of America (2010) – Gates finds new ways to, as he says, “get into the DNA of African culture” in Finding Your Roots.
In each hour-long episode, Gates takes viewers along for the journey with one celebrity pair bound together by an intimate, sometimes hidden link, treks through layers of ancestral history, uncovers secrets and surprises of their family trees and shares life-altering discoveries.
Working closely with leading U.S. genealogists and ancestry experts from around the world, Gates and his production team comb through family stories to discover unknown histories and relatives the guests never knew existed. When paper trails end for each story, the team turns to top geneticists and DNA diagnosticians (such as the genetic testing service 23 & Me) to analyze each participant’s genetic code, tracing their bloodlines and occasionally debunking their long-held notions and beliefs.
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a production of Kunhardt McGee Productions, Inkwell Films and WNET in association with Ark Media. WNET is the parent company of THIRTEEN and WLIW21, New York’s public television stations and operator of NJTV. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local documentaries and other programs for the New York community.
Corporate funding is provided by The Coca-Cola Company, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s and American Express. Additional funding is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Atlantic Philanthropies, Ford Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Support is also provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and PBS.
For preview and episode descriptions, visit http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/.
