“We give each of our guests a form and say, ‘What stories have you told? What mysteries do you want us to solve?’" That’s the process Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. follows with each celebrity who appears on Finding Your Roots, now in its 9th season on PBS. During a TCA press conference last fall, the host and ancestry historian was joined by two of this season’s 21 guests – Joe Manganiello and Tamera Mowry-Housley – who talked about their experience working with “Skip” (Gates’ nickname) and the Earth-shattering things they learned about their lineage.
(Courtesy of PBS)
The Manganiello family had passed down stories about his great-grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. “The Turks came into her house, killed her husband, shot her,” actor Joe Manganiello shared. “She had the presence of mind to lay on the ground and pretend that she was dead while they shot seven of her children and left the eighth one to starve in the crib. So they left. She took a piece of clothing from each one of the children and then strapped the eighth child on her back and then swam across the Euphrates River to get away from the death march. When she got to the other side, the baby on her back had drowned, so she lost the eighth child. She got picked up. Mind you, she's got a bullet. And she gets picked up. She gets put into, I think, an internment camp is what I thought or what I was told, and that there was a German officer there who was stationed during World War I, because the Turks worship German military might at that time, so they invited the German officers to come stay in the camps, and that's where things got muddy. We knew that there was this German World War I officer who got my genocide survivor great-grandmother pregnant, and we didn't know anything other than that, but we know that he went back to Germany. He disappeared. He didn't take her with him. My aunt had a picture of him, and somehow the picture got lost and it moved at some point, so we had nothing to connect us to being German other than this. And so, for years, there's nothing we could do, and all of a sudden I get the call from Finding Your Roots.” Advances in DNA forensics made it possible to unlock the mystery of the German side of the Manganiello family tree.
“It took almost a year,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. revealed about the process of unlocking this part of Joe’s past, with the assistance of a famous DNA analyzer. “CeCe Moore was able to identify the German soldier who fathered Joe's grandmother, Sandra. His name was Karl Wilhelm Wittinger. He was born in 1883 in Heilbronn, Germany. And then, as Joe said, we were able to show Joe a picture of Karl with his wife and three sons, Sandra's half-siblings, taken before World War I.”
“I haven't told [Tia] yet because I want it to be kind of a moment because this is something that my sister and I have always been interested in, and I wanted to give it to her as a gift,” actress Tamera Mowry-Housley shared about keeping what she learned a secret from her twin sister until the episode airs. “Dr. Gates, at the end of the show, gives you your tree, and I'm going to frame it, and I am going to present it to her. It's been hard holding this in.” Like Joe, Tamera had family anecdotes to go off of, but her’s ended up being disproven. “My dad actually was told by his dad that we were Italian and that our last name was Morintini. So, as I got older, I was like, ‘Okay, let me do ancestry.com.” I didn't find any Morintini. Even Ellis Island didn't find Morintini. And I told my dad, I said, ‘Your dad is lying, he was lying to you.’ But what he found was his dad didn't know, so he just made up something.” To find out what Dr. Gate unearthed for the Mowry family, you’ll have to tune in.
Finding Your Roots has come a long way since Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. first appeared on PBS in African American Lives. “I got a letter from this very nice lady, who identified herself as being of Russian-Jewish ancestry,” Dr. Gates recalled, with the writer of the letter wishing the series’ format could expand to include many cultural backgrounds. “At that time, I looked at one episode of Who Do You Think You Are that involved African American news presenters, as they say, for the BBC. And I liked it, but it's very different. They don't do DNA, and they take one guest, and they take them around to different archives and different sites relevant to their family tree. And as Joe and Tamera will tell you, we just sit down; we do a four-hour shoot, and I give them their Book of Life, which contains a record of everything that we found. I have them turn the page, one page at a time, and I take them in the time machine.”
Hopping aboard Skip’s time machine this season are 21 guests, including Julia Roberts, Carol Burnett, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis, Danny Trejo, Angela Davis, and Edward Norton. Season 9 of Finding Your Roots premiered on January 3rd, with new episodes airing on Tuesdays at 8:00 pm only on PBS.