Most of my life, people have known me as Ellen Morris. However, just like my childhood idol, Wonder Woman, I had another identity. My grandfather's original name was Efstratios Maleskos. Like so many others, he came to this country as a teenager without knowing anyone just to make a better life for himself.
Finding Your Roots examines the histories and family genealogies of a number of well-known personalities. But everyone has a story. Whether it's anecdotes about ancestors from generations past, or stories of recent relatives, each of us has a rich, unique genealogical heritage to share. Tell us your family story. We'll post it on our website for others to read and learn from.
While the PBS series Finding Your Roots made only passing reference to connections between guests, the truth is that each guest is separated from each other guest by at most three degrees -- genetically. Continue reading ...
It may take far less than six degrees of separation to connect us. Geneticists who worked on the Finding Your Roots series were able to connect guests through just one or two other individuals. Continue reading ...
People with similar geographic ancestry share these small differences in their mtDNA or their y-DNA and they are grouped together in what are called haplogroups— specific clans or branches of the human family tree. Continue reading ...
The basic drive to discover who we are and where we come from is at the core of the new 10-part PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the 12th series from Professor Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Filmed on location across the United States, the series premieres nationally Sundays, March 25 – May 20 at 8 pm ET on PBS (check local listings).
Sanjay Gupta
Margaret Cho
Martha Stewart
John Legend
Wanda Sykes
Michelle Rodriguez
Adrian Grenier
Linda Chavez
Branford Marsalis
Harry Connick, Jr.
John Lewis
Cory A. Booker
Barbara Walters
Geoffrey Canada
Kevin Bacon 
Kyra Sedgwick
Angela Buchdahl
Rick Warren
Yasir Qadhi
Samuel L. Jackson
Condoleezza Rice
Ruth Simmons
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Robert Downey, Jr.
Finding Your Roots examines the histories and family genealogies of a number of well-known personalities. But everyone has a story. Whether it's anecdotes about ancestors from generations past, or stories of recent relatives, each of us has a rich, unique genealogical heritage to share. Tell us your family story. We'll post it on our website for others to read and learn from.
