I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."

In this episode, we'll meet talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, actor Bill Hader, and legendary television writer and producer, Norman Lear.

Three very funny men who have drawn much of their material from their own families.

One day, I was across the street and said, "Oh, my Aunt Chippy's coming over tonight."

And my friend Cleto said, "Oh, can I come over?"

And I was like, "What?"

He said, "Oh, they're hilarious."

And he really opened my eyes to the fact that they were funny.

My mom accidentally, accidentally, and I wanna stress, accidentally killed our cat.

But I tried to cheer her up by doing impersonation of what it looked like.

Like, you're kinda like this, like.

In the worst of situations, there's comedy to be found.

I think I learned that early on in life.

To explore their roots, we've used every tool at our disposal.

Genealogists have uncovered the paper trail their families left behind.

While geneticists used the latest advances in DNA analysis to expose secrets hundreds of years old.

And we've compiled everything into a book of life.

Wow.

A record of all of our discoveries.

Thanks so much for being on the series.

My pleasure.

Who am I?

Jimmy, Norman, and Bill have each devoted their lives to making people laugh.

Now, they're about to meet ancestors who made tremendous sacrifices to lay the groundwork for their success.

Jimmy Kimmel is one of my favorite late night TV hosts.

Since 2003, he's hosted his own show, honing a unique combination of witty banter, outlandish skits, and wild pranks.

Watch him and you'll see, he genuinely loves to connect with people and to make them laugh.

It's infectious.

And it didn't surprise me to learn that this passion is deeply rooted in his relation to his family.

Growing up, Jimmy realized his mother's Italian American relatives were a comedic gold mine, so he started paying attention.

I would actually sit there with an audio tape recorder and I would record the family having dinner.

I have a sequence committed to memory.

I listen to it so much.

My Uncle Frank is trying to pour ketchup out of the bottle and you hear him say, "Chip, how do you pour this?"

And he's shaking and she goes, "Frank, you got to shake it.

Frank, you got.

Frank, you got to open it, Frank."

He had the cap on.

"You got to open it before it'll pour out."

And then she goes into this brand.

Jimmy's tape recordings were a launching pad of sorts.

At each step of the way, Jimmy drew on his family for inspiration, for support, and raw material.

He was soon doing a routine on a college radio show that eventually led to a career on radio stations across the country before finally landing him in the coveted Los Angeles market.

When he made the leap from radio to television, Jimmy took a chance by putting his family in front of the camera.

Were you nervous about putting your family on air?

No, I wasn't because I knew I didn't belong there either, so it's not like, like they had to share the stage with a seasoned professional and, you know, ultimately the audience decides whether somebody is good or not.

Sure.

I mean, the first time we put my Uncle Frank on the show, people loved him.

The first time we put my Aunt Chippy on the show, people loved her and that's really all you need.

Norman Lear needs no introduction.

With a debut of "All in the Family" in 1971, Norman began to redefine the television sitcom by tackling the issues of the day head on.

His greatest creation was probably Archie Bunker, a remarkably sympathetic and hilariously funny bigot.

But many of Norman's other characters have also been daring and challenging, both to Black and white people, from Fred Sanford and his son Lamont to Maude, J.J.

on "Good Times," and of course, the inimitable George Jefferson.

I've always wanted to meet Norman and find out where these curious characters come from.

Where in the world did Archie Bunker come from?

He existed.

We all knew who he was.

In our own families.

In our own families.

Black and white.

But Black people loved Archie Bunker as much as white people did.

Because he was lovable and he was funny.

And what he was saying was ridiculous.

I mean, is he based on somebody you know or is he just a composite?

Only to the extent that my dad used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met.

And I'd ask him why he had to put down a whole race of people to call me lazy.

And he'd say, "It's not what I'm doing and you're the dumbest white kid I ever met."

Norman is 93 years old, but you never know it to hear him talk.

He delights in telling the story of his life, making much of it seem like a happy accident.

He told me that during his high school years, he excelled at writing and acting, but didn't know what he wanted to do for work.

That changed in the 1940s when he moved to Hollywood to find a job as a publicist.

You could have been a doctor, you could have been a lawyer.

Why a publicist?

I didn't even know what the hell a publicist was, but I knew what a quarter was.

I was a kid of the Depression.

I had one uncle.

He was a publicist.

He used to flick a quarter to me when he saw me.

I wanted to be an uncle who could flick a quarter to a nephew.

Norman turned his job as a publicist into part-time work as a comedy writer.

His big break came when he teamed up with his cousin's husband, a man named Ed Simmons.

Our wives went to a movie one night.

We were taking care of the kids and he was working on a parody and asked me to work with him.

When the girls came home from the movie, we went out and we sold this piece of material for 40 bucks.

The call the next morning was, "Do you guys write television?"

"Oh, sure.

We write television."

Yeah, we got a $6 a month office.

Within a matter of weeks, we were working for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

That's a miracle.

It's a lot of good breaks and a lot of hard work.

Like Norman and Jimmy, my third guest, Bill Hader, seemingly came out of nowhere to take the world of comedy by storm.

Bill grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent years doing odd jobs before joining an improv troupe.

Then he exploded.

His outrageous characters and impersonations made him a mainstay of "Saturday Night Live," earned him two Emmy nominations, and launched a burgeoning movie career.

The journey still takes him by surprise.

People would say, "Did you always wanna be on 'Saturday Night Live'?"

And I was like, "Yes.

Yes."

It's like saying, "Do you wanna go to, you know, Jupiter or something?"

It just didn't seem like a possibility growing up in Oklahoma, you know?

No.

Looking back, Bill says that his sense of humor was present even as a child, but not everyone appreciated his jokes.

I remember one class just pretending I had a robotic arm.

I was in second grade and a teacher telling me to stop and I was like, "I can't, I can't handle this," you know?

The other kids in the class were like, "Dude, stop.

It's not funny."

And so I would spazz out like that and then I was also very sensitive.

Does it run in your family?

Is it genetic, the gift for impersonation?

Yeah.

When we're all having dinner together, we do voices.

They'd be like, "Went to the store and I saw George.

George was there."

And he was like, "Hang on."

And George was there and he's like, "Oh yeah, George."

And everyone will start doing the voice and.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

So you've been practicing in an ensemble for a long time?

Yeah, I've been in ensemble for a while.

Yeah.

Bill got lots of encouragement from his family, particularly from his father, but they didn't always share the same interests.

My dad loves sports and I just, I didn't take to it.

And then I remember saying, "I don't wanna go out for basketball this year.

I just got cast in "The Glass Menagerie."

Wow.

And I remember my dad was cool with it, but he was a little quiet about it.

I think he, "God, I really wish he went out for basketball."

And then he went to the first show and he was like, "How'd you know all those lines?

How did you do that?"

He is such a warm-hearted person.

Oh, yeah.

It was the first thing in a long time where someone went, "Hey, you're really good at this."

Yeah.

And it just totally changed my life.

Bill, Norman, and Jimmy are three of the funniest people I've ever met, and I have expected their family trees to be filled with outlandish characters who had done hilarious things.

But as I researched their roots, I discovered something entirely different.

Their families were actually filled with stories of hardship and sacrifice, stories that were in many cases kept secret.

I wanted to reveal these secrets.

I began with Jimmy Kimmel and a mystery surrounding his great-grandfather, Frank Kimmel.

Recognize that guy?

That is my grandfather's father, and what a face that is.

I mean, that is.

It's more Muppet than human.

That's Frank Kimmel.

Are you sure you wanna go down this road?

Yeah, let's go down it.

Okay, let's see what we found out.

Frank Kimmel was the first person on Jimmy's family tree to use the surname Kimmel.

His parents, Christian and Theresa, were German immigrants who spelled their name Kummel with a U. It appears that Frank changed it to Kimmel, perhaps to make it sound less German during an era when the United States and Germany were at war.

Such a switch was not unusual at the time.

But when we researched the Kummels, the story became more complicated.

We uncovered two key documents, Frank's mother's obituary and his father's will.

Both were missing one very important detail.

Jimmy, what do you notice, my friend?

Neither of them acknowledges the existence of my great-grandfather, Frank.

It's pretty cold- Yes.

Not to mention your own kid in the obituary, right?

This raised a host of questions.

Was it possible that Christian and Theresa weren't really Frank's parents?

We discovered a clue in their marriage record.

When were his parents married?

April 13th, 1886.

Could you read when he was born?

December 1880.

Theresa and Christian were married six years after Frank was born.

He was a pastor.

It's a harsh word.

Okay.

So, was Frank born out of wedlock or was something else going on here?

Passenger records show that Theresa Kummel, whose maiden name was Stockhausen, immigrated from Germany to New York City in 1883.

At that time, Frank was three, but he didn't sail with his mother on this ship.

Theresa sailed alone.

So, where was Frank?

For obvious reasons, mothers and young children immigrating to America tended to travel together.

Frank's absence from this record made us wonder if Theresa was actually Frank's mother, but his absence alone wasn't conclusive proof.

So what do you make of this?

Are Theresa and Christian Frank's parents?

I don't know.

Not if she traveled without him.

This changes everything.

You know, it's very interesting.

The one ancestor that is responsible for my last name is the one about whom there is question.

Thought that was my last name.

Maybe it isn't.

We searched archives in New York and in Germany, but we couldn't find any clues.

The paper trail had gone cold.

We consulted Cece Moore, a genetic genealogist, and asked her if we could use DNA to determine if Jimmy Kimmel's great-grandfather, Frank, was really the son of Christian Kummel and Theresa Stockhausen.

Cece identified two people.

One is a descendant of the Stockhausen family, so we could search for a signal of Theresa's DNA.

If Frank was Theresa's son, then his descendants should carry some of this Stockhausen DNA.

You see any red?

So Jimmy, based on this test, Theresa was most likely not Frank's real mother.

Oh.

Who's gonna break this to Frank?

What about Christian?

Now this is the show stuff.

The other was through a descendant originating from both Theresa and Christian Kummel, which would allow us to determine if Frank was the son of either of them or both of them.

So take a look at this family tree.

This is Christian Kummel and Theresa Stockhausen.

We traced another of their descendants and found one of their great-grandsons who was willing to test for us.

So we're comparing his DNA to Jimmy's father's DNA, and they should be second cousins.

So why are we testing Jimmy's father and not Jimmy?

Because James Sr.

is one generation closer to Frank in time, which makes it easier to detect the connection.

So what are we gonna see?

If the Kummel and the Stockhausen descendants are related to James Sr., then we'll see blocks of red like this.

If he's only descended from one of them, then we'll see less red.

That makes sense.

I was very excited to share with Jimmy what we found out.

So that means that Christian Kummel had Frank with another woman.

Bingo.

And that you are a Kimmel.

This is very good news because I did not wanna go to the DMV and get my passport redone.

And I mean, there are just so many things.

Christmas cards.

This could be a disaster.

Is this a relief?

Yeah, it's a relief I didn't know I had to be relieved about, but it's definitely a relief.

In many ways, this is a very sad story.

Something must have happened that led to Frank's estrangement from the couple who raised him, but there's no way to know what it was.

Jimmy's father told us that Frank never talked about his family, so the Kimmels know virtually nothing about their roots back in Germany.

With diligent digging, we were able to change all of that by tracing Christian Kummel's line deep into the past, all the way back to Jimmy's ninth great-grandfather, a man named Johannes Kummel, who was born in 1608.

Did you imagine that you had such deep German roots?

Well, I assumed that there must be some, but I didn't think you'd be able to find them.

I mean, that's pretty remarkable.

Next, I turn to Norman Lear.

Though he's made millions of us laugh at stories of his invented families, Norman knows very little about his actual family, and what he does know is tinged with sadness.

I have one flash of a memory when I was a child.

We were all outside and my father astonished me jumping over a bush.

And you thought he was Superman.

Well, he was Superman.

Did you have a happy childhood?

No.

No.

When Norman was just eight years old, his father made a crucial decision that would change the course of his life.

Accused in theft, two inspectors from police headquarters arrested Herman Lear, 38, who was alleged to have stolen $50,000 worth of bonds.

He had his hat in front of his face and manacled to a detective.

The night my father went to prison, my mother was selling all the furniture.

She couldn't live in the house there.

We were moving, and some older guy puts his hand on my shoulder and says, "Well, Norman, you're the man in the house now."

Just what you needed to hear, right?

Yeah, the foolishness of the human condition.

You know, I had empathy even as a kid for a guy going out struggling to be a provider in the Depression, but I wanted to be as far from his kind of reputation as I could possibly be.

At the same time, I didn't wanna lose him.

No.

So I think I've dragged him along throughout my life and sought to be free of him at the same time.

Norman's father was sentenced to two years in prison for receiving stolen goods, devastating the family, and leaving Norman with many unanswered questions.

When I think about him, the worst I can think of is rascal, 'cause I loved him so much.

But we learned that there was a very significant episode in his father's life about which Norman knew nothing.

Herman Lear saw active combat in one of the most brutal battles of World War I. In 1917, when he was 24 years old, he enlisted and ultimately was one of more than a million Americans in France engaged in what is known as the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Lasting 47 days, it was the bloodiest fight on foreign soil in United States history with almost 120,000 casualties, including more than 26,000 deaths and Herman Lear was right in the middle of the action.

We found a report describing the activities of his battalion.

"The detachment of the 307th Field Signal Battalion has performed excellent service during the offensive under conditions of at times great danger."

I never knew of this.

I'm astounded.

I mean, I'll be thinking about this whatever forever is for me.

But it's a completely different aspect of your father than you knew.

Oh my God, yes.

I'm finding out now.

Oh, you Skip Gates, what have you done to me?

Herman's combat experience undoubtedly shaped his life, making it all the more remarkable that he never once mentioned it to his son, but it's just one of many hardships that were concealed from Norman.

Moving back one generation on his father's line, we came to Norman's grandparents, Solomon and Anna Lear, who witnessed horrifying events in Imperial Russia.

Did they talk about Russia much, Elizavetgrad?

I mean- Not at all.

Let's take you to Elizavetgrad.

Born in the 1870s, Norman's grandparents grew up among Russian Jews confined to an area of Russia known as the Pale of Settlement.

With a peak population of more than five million, the Pale, at that time, was home to the largest Jewish community in the world.

It was a place of abject poverty.

Jews were largely prohibited from buying farmland or obtaining an education, and it was about to get worse.

In 1881, the political situation in Russia exploded into violence when Czar Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionaries.

In the aftermath, Jews became targets of suspicion and blame.

A terrifying pogrom swept through Norman's grandparents' town of Elizavetgrad, destroying nearly half of it.

Coverage of the violence even appeared in American newspapers.

"The Christians attacked the houses and shops of the Jews indiscriminately.

By smashing doors, breaking windows, the violence was continued throughout Thursday.

More than half their houses are completely ruined."

What we are capable of as human beings by way of our own inhumanity is mind-blowing.

It's mind-blowing.

It's mind-blowing.

Norman's grandparents, Solomon and Anna Lear, were among some 150,000 Jews who fled Russia for the United States in the decade after the pogroms.

They sailed for New York in November of 1890.

Solomon was 20, Anna, 18.

They were recently married, and now they were safe, but they had left someone behind.

Solomon's father, Norman's great-grandfather, Jacob, stayed behind in Russia.

This isn't surprising.

He was 67 years old.

It would've been a grueling trip for a man of his age, but it was a dangerous decision.

One year later, another pogrom swept through Elizavetgrad, this one worse than the previous one.

Jacob had to act fast.

That's a passenger list for the S.S.

Scandia, and that is the ship.

You see any names on the passenger list?

So he got away.

Jacob Lear got away.

Good for you, Jacob.

Jacob's decision to immigrate here may have saved his life.

It certainly improved it, and it also allowed us to help Norman make a remarkable discovery.

Jacob lived in America for 10 years before he passed away in 1902.

Jacob's headstone, which we found in a cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, lists his father as Eliezer Halevi.

The word Halevi is not a surname.

It indicates that Eliezer was a Levite, an elite class of Jews who, in biblical tradition, traced their ancestry back to Levi, the son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham.

This means that according to this tradition, Norman is a direct descendant of the founder of Judaism.

You ever dream that we would find your great-great-grandfather?

Yeah, I did.

About four days ago, I woke up about 3:30 in the morning and I said, "Son of a bitch.

They're gonna find my great-great-grandfather and his name is gonna be Eliezer.

And guess what?

You're right.

And he was a Levite.

But guess what?

Don't screw with me, buddy.

Now that we'd revealed to Norman the possibility that his paternal Jewish ancestry could be traced all the way back to Abraham, I turned to Bill Hader.

Like Norman and Jimmy, Bill knows very little about his father's family tree.

Have you heard many stories about your father's ancestors, his roots?

No, nothing.

So that wasn't part of the family ritual, telling family stories?

No, very little.

Okay.

Last name's Hader, I think.

I don't know.

I really know nothing.

Yeah.

Well, in that case, we might as well stop 'cause we found nothing.

It's just a complete blank slate.

Oh, good.

That makes so much sense.

As we researched Bill's father's line, we soon discovered something in common with Norman Lear's.

On April 11th, 1917, Bill's great-grandfather, a man named Arthur Hader, joined the American Army to fight in World War I. Like Norman Lear's father, he was sent to France.

But unlike Norman's father, Arthur Hader wasn't exactly thrown into combat.

Instead, his battery was held in reserve and he was stationed behind the lines of the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

The Hader family soon received a letter describing his whereabouts, a letter from a French woman who was clearly enjoying his company.

"You are surely wondering where is your son, Arthur, since he left you, but be without fear, he is for the present far from the front and he often says he found in us a second mother, a French mother who will always be happy to receive him."

Yeah, man, war is going all right, guys.

I don't need to go home.

I'm all right.

War as hell.

Yeah, war as hell, but I mean, these French women are just, I mean.

I had no idea I had anybody in my family who was in war.

I didn't know that.

Ever?

Ever.

God, they must have been so scared.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Recognize anyone in that photo?

Wow.

Is that him?

That is your great-grandfather, Arthur.

That's my great-grandfather.

Any family resemblances?

That's crazy.

He looks like my dad.

It turns out Arthur was more of a soldier than we initially thought.

Eager to fight, he fled the comfort of his French hostess and made his way toward the front lines of the battle without authorization.

He was soon intercepted by officers and returned to the rear, where he was lightly disciplined for leaving his unit without orders.

Nonetheless, Arthur had taken an extraordinary risk, seemingly in hopes of seeing combat.

Why would he do such a thing?

The answer may lie in his roots.

Arthur was the son of German immigrants.

When the United States entered World War I, German Americans were looked upon with suspicion.

Arthur may well have risked his life to prove his loyalty.

We are not alike.

Do you think he in part was motivated by wanting to show that in spite of their origins, they really were patriots?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

Or he was just a really violent person.

I have no idea.

Can you, in your wildest dreams, see yourself- No.

Doing what he did?

No.

No.

He was a man.

So, I'm a descendant of an actual, like, man.

I'm standing up straighter like my ancestors.

I'm starting to sit like a war hero.

To Bill's surprise, Arthur wasn't the only soldier in his family tree.

When we turned to his mother's line, we discovered that several of her ancestors were also touched by war, and indeed, one was forced to make a choice over his loyalty, much as Arthur had.

We found Bill's third great-grandfather, a man named Thomas Conner, in the 1860 census for Laclede County, Missouri.

Thomas was 21 years old.

Four years later, with the Civil War raging, Thomas was a prime fighting age, and he had to make a choice.

Although Missouri was a slave state, on the border of the north and the south, it remained part of the Union, but the Confederacy was eager to claim it.

In fact, the majority of men who enlisted in Laclede County chose to fight with the rebels, which led Bill to a nervous question.

Did your ancestor go to the north or did your ancestor go to the south?

I don't know.

I hope it's... I'm praying it's north.

Your third great-grandfather, Thomas, entered the war on the side of the Union.

Oh.

Whew.

Oh.

Okay.

So far, so good.

All right, let's find out what he did.

Would you please turn the page?

Defected?

No, I'm joking.

Bill's third great-grandfather, Thomas, fought in an operation across Ozark County, Missouri, which saw fierce fighting at the close of the war.

While Thomas survived, he soon fell victim to something else.

Nasal catarrh, the 19th century term for a respiratory infection.

It could be every bit as fatal as a bullet.

Over the course of the Civil War, two out of every three deaths were caused by disease, not by combat.

And while Bill's third great-grandfather recovered, he may have been affected by the illness for the rest of his life.

We found affidavits in his pension record from the owners of a pub where Thomas worked in his later years.

They claimed that Thomas was growing deaf as a result of his wartime infection.

"Conner has been slightly deaf and his deafness appears to have been increasing.

After men call, he looks at them and listens with all the peculiarities of a deaf man.

He's getting more and more deaf each year."

Wow.

You think that's funny?

It kind of is.

Thomas went deaf as a result of the illness he contracted, that nasal catarrh.

Thomas was effectively a deaf bartender.

Wow.

Yeah.

I come from a long line of deaf bartenders.

I wanna show you something.

That is the bar- Wow.

Where he worked.

Oh my gosh.

He's the one going like this.

Now this guy sounds more like me.

This guy I get.

I now revealed to Bill, Norman, and Jimmy the stories of ancestors that they never knew even existed.

It was time to turn to stories that were a little closer to home.

Jimmy Kimmel had asked me to help him explore the maternal side of his family, the family he spent time with as a kid.

They were from Italy and just the sight of them elicits strong emotions.

Who are those people?

Those are my grandparents, Sal and Edith.

Sorry, I get emotional.

No, no, it's okay, buddy.

Were your grandparents a big part of your childhood?

Never met them.

Oh.

You crazy.

No.

Yeah, we were very close.

My grandfather was just hilarious.

He was an upholsterer and a film splicer by trade, but he was an artist and he made some of the craziest things.

I have a diorama at my home.

Instead of Jesus and the Apostles at the last supper, it's Big Bird and the Muppets.

Jimmy told me that he wanted to know about his beloved grandfather Sal's parents, Vincenzo and Maria Iacano.

They were Southern Italian immigrants and among the first members of his mother's family to arrive in America.

Jimmy wanted to know what their lives were like when they landed.

We started with the first United States census record in which they appeared from 1910.

They used their nicknames instead of their- You mean James and Mary?

Yeah.

James Iacano, 46 years old, coal shoveler.

There's a career for you.

Coal shovelers were frequently injured, sometimes even killed in accidents, long hours in abysmal conditions.

It's hard to believe when you think about it, this was a better life, but for millions, it was.

Jimmy's great-grandparents settled in the lower east side of New York City, a neighborhood that was dirty, disease-infested, and suffocatingly overcrowded with other newly arrived immigrants.

I know they all lived in tiny little place together.

Yeah.

There's a story in our family that they were driven out of one of their apartments by an evil spirit of some kind.

Great-grandmother was bitten on the leg and she had a dream about a little boy in sheep's clothing and he told them to get out of there and they moved immediately.

Now I read about the disease, she probably got bit by a rat.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably so.

While the lower east side of New York may have been challenging for his great-grandparents, the story of how they got to America suggests that it was, in fact, a better place for them to live.

The story begins with a passenger record for a ship called the S.S.

Ravenna, which arrived in New York in January of 1903.

Vincenzo Iacano, 35 years old, traveling with $10.

That marks the moment the first Italian on this branch of your family tree set foot in the United States.

$10.

To move your family to another country on a boat is such a tumultuous thing to do.

And it took so much courage.

Either courage or desperation.

I don't know.

Yeah, or both.

Yeah.

Well, the record that you're looking at indicates that Vincenzo was traveling alone.

So, any idea where Maria and the children might have been?

The Bahamas?

Vincenzo's wife Maria brought their two children to New York nine months later.

The journey must have been harrowing.

Most Italian immigrants traveled in steerage, sleeping alongside their luggage and washing with only salt water on trips that took as long as two weeks.

It's difficult to imagine a young mother in these conditions traveling with two children under the age of five.

But as we researched the family's life back in Italy, I began to understand why she might have been willing to face this ordeal.

Vincenzo and Maria came from the town of Casamicciola on the tiny Italian island of Ischia.

On the night of June 28th, 1883, Ischia was devastated by an earthquake.

Much of Casamicciola was destroyed and many of Vincenzo's family members were killed.

Jimmy had heard stories that Vincenzo only survived because he and his mother were attending the opera in nearby Naples when the earthquake struck.

I wanted to know if this curious story could possibly be true.

Your family lore had it that Vincenzo and his mother were in Naples at a famous theater called the Teatro San Carlo.

But Jimmy, that theater still exists, so we went there and the records don't indicate that any play was staged that night.

She was having an affair.

But we did, however, find evidence of a performance at Casamicciola and we believe it's highly likely that your great-grandfather Vincenzo and his mom were there not in Naples.

I have to say, one thing, knowing my family as well as I do, it seemed like an unnecessary expense.

You know, the only time we ever went to a show when I was a kid is when we got free tickets.

Vincenzo and his mother survived the earthquake, not because they were in Naples, but because the theater was built of wood, not stone, and thus better withstood the trembling earth.

Meanwhile, Vincenzo's father and three of his siblings died.

Remarkably, the family's experience inside the theater that fateful night was recorded in a New York Times article dated August 12th, 1883.

"At the half hour, the curtain rose, but scarcely were the first words of the comedy spoken when we felt a tremendous shock.

Like a horrible dream, I remember only that we were a heap of human beings tumbled together."

Wow.

What a crazy thing if you think about it, that he went from his town being reduced to rubble, and I'm sure they did a lot of shoveling, those who were left behind, to the United States to shovel.

He kept digging.

Yeah, he kept digging.

Now we're digging around for him.

It's funny, you get upset about people that you don't even know.

Now, you carry DNA from these people.

Yeah, and their food is part of, you know, my life.

Their smells, you know, their tastes.

Yeah.

Their sense of humor.

Now that we had revealed the epic struggles of Jimmy's ancestors, I wanted to return to Norman Lear's family tree, focusing on his maternal grandmother, Lizzy Fish.

Lizzy played a very important role in Norman's childhood, helping to raise him after his father went to prison and encouraging him to follow in his own path.

This woman was the light of my life.

Bubba, Yiddish word for grandmother.

There was no question in my mind that she loved me.

She had a sense of humor.

She didn't speak a lot, but it was all in her eyes and the attitude of her body.

It was all in the way she reacted to everything that was going on around her.

It was all on her face.

And you watched her.

Yeah, and I watched it.

Lizzy and her husband, Shia Sokolovsky, came from Elizavetgrad, the same town where many of Norman's father's ancestors had lived.

But Norman's mother's family stayed in Russia, even as the pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s erupted around them.

It was a decision they would soon regret.

In January of 1905, the violent suppression of a peaceful protest in St.

Petersburg triggered a national uprising, a precursor to the Russian revolution 12 years later.

Almost overnight, the empire descended into chaos.

Roughly half a million workers went on strike.

Peasants rose up and attacked the homes of their landlords.

And a new wave of antisemitism unleashed the most serious consequences for the Jews living in Elizavetgrad.

"The peasants will soon be allowed to murder Hebrews without fear of punishment.

Driven by despair, the Hebrews appealed to the chief of police, offering him a bribe of many thousands of roubles for protection.

His reply was, 'Take this money and buy arms.'"

Holy... In the name of God, how we do this to each other.

And your mom and your grandmother were living there.

I never heard about this.

Your grandmother Lizzy was 30 and your mom was six.

My God, this is as moving as anything, this little piece here.

These silences, you know, people witnessed trauma and then didn't talk about it.

Norman's beloved grandmother and the rest of her family stayed behind in Elizavetgrad while her husband Shia sailed to America, hoping to send for them soon after he arrived.

Norman, this is a passenger record for a ship called the S.S.

Maine, which sets sail for the Port of New York, September 23rd, 1905.

Can you see who was on that ship?

Leie Sokolovsky, Enie, Abraham, and Israel.

Your mother, Jeanette, was called Enie.

Did you know she was called that?

No.

In September 1905, your grandfather Shia was finally able to get them out of Russia and bring them to New York.

Did they ever talk about their reunion with Shia?

No.

I never heard talk about it.

It must have been quite an emotional scene.

The silences in the Lear family are profound, but Norman told us that his grandfather Shia's feelings for his adopted country were quite pronounced.

He was deeply patriotic.

There used to be lots of parades, bands and flags, and military music, and I can remember standing at street corners holding his hand.

I'd look up and see a tear coming down my grandfather's face as the flag came by.

We still had one more bit of information about Norman's grandmother that we knew he would treasure.

We found it in Kirovograd, the city that was once Elizavetgrad, now located in the heart of the Ukraine.

It was a stroke of luck since so many Jewish records were destroyed by pogroms, a revolution, and two world wars.

But somehow, miraculously, the archives of Kirovograd hold Norman's grandmother's birth certificate.

Girl, Basheva, father, Yisroel Fish.

Birthdate, December 22nd, 1875.

Huh.

Basheva.

I don't have the words to express how much I love this being.

And she loved you.

She loved me.

Do you ever dream that we'd get back this far on your family trees?

Never, never, never, never, never.

Norman and Jimmy's immigrant ancestors embody the experience of millions of people who came to the United States seeking a better life and who were willing to endure great hardship to achieve it.

Their sacrifices helped America become what it is today.

Returning to Bill Hader, I wanted to find his earliest immigrant ancestors.

But first, I had a different kind of story to tell, one that stretches back to the founding of the Republic.

Bill's maternal sixth great-grandfather was a man named William Simms.

William Simms was roughly 44 years old when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775.

Despite his age, he signed up to fight for the rebels.

Your sixth great-grandfather, Bill, was an Albemarle County militia man who fought in the 6th Virginia Regiment and was stationed just outside Williamsburg during the American Revolution.

Wow.

We discovered that William Simms was actually involved in a number of significant battles during the war.

He fought at the Siege of Charleston, South Carolina and the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey.

His unit also served at the Battle of Trenton, which means he most likely crossed the icy Delaware River under General George Washington's command, part of the brilliant Christmas night maneuver that enabled the continental army to win one of its most resounding victories.

That's insane.

You are the descendant of a patriot.

I descend from all these tough guys.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, but yeah.

But while William Simms fought for liberty, he was also simultaneously involved with the most peculiar paradox of our nation's founding, slavery.

This is another document from 1782 from Albemarle County, Virginia.

William Simms, nine slaves, 20 cattle, six horses.

That's wild.

So did you ever think that you had slaves in the family?

I was putting money on it that you were gonna tell me I had a slave in my family.

It shouldn't be a surprise.

He lived in Virginia, was the biggest slave state in the Union at the time.

Many of America's founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners, even though slavery was a fundamental violation of the New Republic's ideals that all men are created equal.

This contradiction lies at the heart of our nation's creation, and Bill found it sobering to learn that his ancestor was among those who embodied it.

Does it change the way you think about American history?

Yeah.

You know, it personalizes it.

It's just like anything, you know?

I wanna read up on this.

I wanna learn more.

Could we possibly take Bill's family back even further, we wondered, to the century before the revolution, when North America was one of the British colonies, and Bill's ancestors were among those brave early settlers.

We were able to go all the way back to a man who lived in rural Maryland in the 1660s, a man named Henry Brockman, who we believe is Bill's eighth great-grandfather.

Brockman was an indentured servant.

At the time, plantation owners relied on enslaved women and men from Africa and indentured servants from Europe for labor.

It was a tough life.

Four out of every 10 indentured servants died before the end of their term of forced labor.

1674, your eighth great-grandfather, Henry Brockman, had worked out payment and had received 50 acres of land in exchange.

Wow.

Your people have been here forever.

That's wild.

Forever.

That is wild.

Henry Brockman.

Good job, man.

It turns out that Henry was just one stop in an enormous paper trail that Bill's ancestors left behind.

In fact, Bill has one of the most extensive European ancestries that we've ever been able to piece together.

But there was more.

This, Bill Hader, is your family tree.

Wow.

Look at that.

Edward I, King of England.

King of England.

That's your family, man.

Charlemagne, the fame leader of the Holy Roman Empire.

Bill Hader.

What?

You're looking at your 40th great-grandfather.

What?

He was hailed as the father of Europe.

I'm just blown away.

The conqueror of Europe.

Geez, my gosh.

I couldn't even get the coffeemaker to work this morning.

Now that we had exhausted the paper trail, I wanted to share with my guests what DNA could reveal about their deeper roots.

Given his father's German ancestry and his mother's Italian ancestry, we thought that Jimmy's admixture results would be entirely European, but what we found took us by surprise.

Wow.

I have to say I'm excited to be 2% African.

Well, actually, it's North Africa, and that could be traced back to the Tunisian Muslim conquerors of Sicily.

We wondered if there would be DNA evidence to support the genealogical stories that we had shared with Bill and Norman.

I'm gonna turn the page, there's gonna be a dinosaur there.

You got some brother in there.

I mean, that's amazing.

That is African DNA.

That is Black sub-Saharan DNA inherited from your mother's side.

In the earliest days of the American colonies, African slaves and indentured servants lived and worked side by side.

Yeah, Brockman.

When the lights came down, a lot of sneaking and creeping going on up in there.

Brockman.

Henry.

Next, we looked at Norman's paternal haplogroup, a genetic fingerprint that is inherited exclusively from his direct paternal line.

He inherited this DNA from the Lear men in his family, such as his great-grandfather, Jacob.

And we discovered that Norman does carry what is believed to be the dominant genetic signature found among Levites.

This also confirms what was written on that headstone.

That's amazing.

Thank you all for that.

I like my DNA.

I found it fascinating that although all three of my guests make their livings by telling stories about lively characters, they seem to come from families that spoke little about the characters on their own family trees.

How could this knowledge be forgotten in your family?

I'm trying to figure that out right now in this moment.

You know, I don't know the answer to that.

I don't know why I didn't grow up with a picture of Arthur in my house.

Sure.

You know?

Yeah.

Will you think about it now?

Oh, 100%.

Jimmy, finally, in light of everything that we've discussed, what do you think makes us who we are?

Just in the simplest of things.

I mean, traditions that you don't even know are traditions, and I think that we should know our history, and I think to know the history of your country and the world, it's important to know history of your family first.

Norman, if you could go back in time and meet one person, which one would it be?

Well, I'd like to sit around with my Bubby and her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother over her gefilte fish.

I think that would be pretty cool.

Norman Lear, thank you for the privilege of introducing you to your ancestors.

I couldn't appreciate more being here with you.

We've reached the end of our journey with Jimmy, Norman, and Bill.

Join me next time as we unlock the secrets of the past for three new guests on another episode of "Finding Your Roots."

(music plays through credits)