Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

- Season 1

(2012)

Actor and musician Harry Connick, Jr. and legendary jazz musician Branford Marsalis share their love of jazz and New Orleans itself, but they both also have European immigrant ancestors who blazed unconventional trails in America.

Two African-American politicians from different generations and opposite backgrounds, legendary civil rights leader John Lewis, and Democratic senator Cory Booker, learn about black and white slavery era ancestors they never knew about.

Prof. Gates unearths missing links in the family histories of legendary broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, and equally notable activist and educator Geoffrey Canada, as they try to learn the original last names of their fathers.

What do husband and wife Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have in common? Other than being famous Hollywood actors in their own right, they both also come from old abolitionist families. But that's just the beginning.

Family roots of Baptist evangelical Christian megachurch founder, pastor Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian-American Rabbi, and American Muslim scholar Yasir Qadhi unearth a story about the spiritual foundations of America.

Actors Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal are textbook examples of Americans with a rich medley of European immigrant stories in their family trees.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Brown University president Ruth Simmons were all once second-class citizens in the Jim Crow south. Where in Africa do they come from and who are their white ancestors?

Comedienne Margaret Cho, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and TV personality Martha Stewart are all children of first or second-generation immigrants and share the peculiar burdens of that heritage.

Musician John Legend and comedienne Wanda Sykes, as well as Professor Gates himself and his 98-year-old friend Margarett Cooper, discover the extraordinary stories of the free black ancestors they never knew about.

Actress Michelle Rodriguez, actor Adrian Grenier and Republican analyst Linda Chavez all share Spanish colonial roots, yet each views their own identity very differently.