Finding Your Roots

What was once a dream for those who could afford the extensive research time & travel has become affordable for everyone thanks to genetic services such as 23&Me and Ancestry - and the series inspires the viewer to do just that, to discover their past through genetics.

The series is entertaining and informative as well as emotive and compelling. It's definitely a must "schedule record" on the dvr as not not miss an episode.

What's it like to see that How's that make you feel You are looking at the moment Did you know that story Did you sense that Please turn the page Please read the transcribed/hilited area Have you ever heard that You just met your xxxxxgrand parents You just learned

I enjoy the show, I have learned a lot of information regarding my Irish roots, as well as places to make contacts. Many of the guest are forever entertaining.

I remember one story when the mother escaped by carrying her child on her back only to drown it when she crossed a body of water.

Tony Shaloub was one of my favorites.

Valarie

Valarie.

Genealogical research is often fascinating, illuminating and addictive. But here's the thing about televising something that involves a lot of library time and reading -- you have to make it engaging. Finding Your Roots means well but it is nowhere near as fun or interesting to watch as another genealogical show, Who Do You Think You Are, currently airing on TLC. Unfortunately, it is Gates himself that is a drag on the show. He is a scholar and a professor and his sit downs with his guests come across like a dry lecture. The guests show up like good students for the lecture but they have had little or no personal involvement in the quest up to that point. And frankly some of them don't look too interested in their own stories.

I've been involved in genealogical research for many decades and I have learned some remarkable things at the hands of Professor Gates and his association with PBS. I don't want the show to disappear but I would encourage PBS to reformat it in favor of engaging both the guest and the viewer to a higher degree. They have the perfect opportunity to do that in the wake of the revelation that Gates and the show's producers covered up the facts of Ben Affleck's slave owning ancestry.

Finding your roots pulls at our heartstrings and speaks to our senseability with their strong research. The Production Manager in this show really shines!

I started to watch this a few days ago and couldn't stop watching. I laughed and I cried while learning about people I never knew existed and had no relationship to me.

Another reviewer complained that the program is not telling the whole story about slavery and our founding fathers. No historical record can tell the whole story. We get bits and pieces from various sources.

When I studied U.S. history in school ---I'm 73, as I write this ---no one mentioned that many of our founding fathers had slaves. I learned that information during the intervening years because I've read a lot of history and watched many documentaries. But for many, who don't read history, this may be new information.

I learned much myself from the episodes I watched. For example, I didn't know that freed slaves were often captured and placed back into slavery. I didn't know that some free slaves bought their relatives and had to keep them as legal slaves so they could not be put back into slavery by someone else. I also learned heartwarming stories of slave owners who freed their slaves and gave them property before the Civil War, which I assumed was extremely rare.

I was impressed at how many people were willing to give DNA samples that could possibly prove that their slave-owning ancestors fathered the children of slaves, thus completing some stories about certain branches of a family.

The one thing that everyone can take away from these episodes is that our genetic makeup is rarely pure. We are mostly a combination of ethnicities and races, and therefore racism is not only harmful but stupid. Most of us don't know where all of our ancestors began their lives and under what hardships they lived in order to make life better for their heirs. No matter where they cam from, they contributed to who we are now.