Finding Your Roots

Premise

The series uses traditional genealogical research and genetics to discover the family history of well-known Americans. Genetic techniques include Y-chromosome DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA analyses to infer both ancient and recent genetic relationships. The series has examined the family histories of celebrity guests with African American, Asian American, Chinese American, Greek American, Indian American, Irish American, Italian American, Jewish American, and Latin American heritage.

Each celebrity guest is given a book of life, which contains all of the information discovered about the guest's genealogy by researchers. Included in or with the book are comprehensive genetic results, a family tree that is as complete as paper research allows, copies of historical records used to assemble each tree, and photos of newly found family members. In some episodes, particularly episodes in which original DNA research must be used to establish a past ancestor's parental link, guests are reunited with long-lost relatives. However, in most episodes, each guest is predominately shown seated opposite Gates as he guides them through their book of life. To show correlations between the guests family stories, each episode cuts back and forth between two or three guest stories. To draw further correlations Gates uses examples from his own genealogy quite frequently. Examples of this would be a grandmother of his having multiple children with a white man whose name she never revealed, as well as Gates' membership into the Sons of the American Revolution.

In addition to celebrity guests, everyday people are sometimes featured in an episode to create a third or fourth story line. Usually the non-celebrity guests are a group of peers. An example of this would be the episode in which Gates has his friends at his local barbershop take a DNA test to determine their ethnic makeup, each friend betting on their percentages of African, European, and Native American genetic heritage. Another episode uses a similar guessing game with students at a local school. Singular secondary guests include Robert Downey, Sr. and Margarett Cooper, the latter being a friend of Gates'.

Background

The series has seen two past incarnations on PBS, both of which were hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 2006 and 2008 the series African American Lives aired. Both seasons of the series consisted of a season-long story line as well as an all African American cast. In 2010 Faces of America aired. Though it continued to use the season-long plot from the prior installment, it was the first installment hosted by Gates to include Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds. Starting with Finding Your Roots in 2012, the series redirected from a season-long plot, to having plots extending only within a single episode. In doing so it has allowed the series to extend its number of episodes each season to ten, opposed to the prior four episodes a season.

Ethics problem

The show's third season was postponed after it was discovered that actor Ben Affleck had persuaded Gates to omit information about his slave-owning ancestors. The series returned on January 5, 2016.