"Finding Your Roots" with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., returns for an all-new, 10-episode season, premiering at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 3 on Panhandle PBS. The series will also be available for streaming at pbs.org and on the PBS Video app.
Season nine of the show highlights the genealogical backgrounds and ancestral stories of prominent guests like Jamie Chung ("Lovecraft Country"), Danny Trejo ("Machete"), Angela David, journalists Jim Acosta and Van Jones, and Viola Davis ("The Woman King").
Over the course of ten episodes, Gates uses genealogical detective work and cutting-edge DNA analysis to guide twenty-one influential guests through the branches of their family trees. Uncovering buried secrets and inspiring stories of long forgotten ancestors.
Gates said "I am deeply proud of this series – and especially this season. I think it is so important today to show what we have in common, as Americans, and as human beings, despite our apparent differences. The stories we find in our guests' family trees demonstrate – repeatedly – that we are a fundamentally blended nation that draws strength from our diversity."
At the center of all of it, guiding every discovery, is host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Assembling the extensive family trees and ancestral narratives alongside Dr. Gates are DNA expert CeCe Moore (chief genetic genealogist for Parabon Nanolabs and host of ABC's "The Genetic Detective") and Genealogists Nick Sheedy and Kimberly Morgan, who together have solved hundreds of mysteries and reconnected innumerable lost relatives over the past two decades.
