All Seasons

Season 1

  • S01E01 The Road Home

    • February 6, 2008
    • PBS

    An investigation of Tom Joyner's family history uncovers great-uncles who may have been unjustly executed. Also featured: author Bliss Broyard ("One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life"), whose black father passed as white.

  • S01E02 A Way Out of No Way

    • February 6, 2008
    • PBS

    The story of Chris Rock's great-great-grandfather, who served in South Carolina's state legislature following the Civil War. Also, Don Cheadle learns that his ancestors were enslaved by Chickasaw Indians.

  • S01E03 We Come from People

    • February 13, 2008
    • PBS

    Information about Morgan Freeman's great-grandmother is unearthed in the records of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era federal agency. Also: the story of theologian Peter Gomes' ancestors, who were freed in the late 1700s by Quakers.

  • S01E04 The Past Is Another Country

    • February 13, 2008
    • PBS

    Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovers that he's related to a medieval Irish warlord; Peter Gomes learns that his paternal ancestry descends from a Portuguese Jew, who fled his homeland to escape the Inquisition in the early 1500s.