Finding Your Roots

20121h 0m / epDocumentary

First aired

March 24, 2012

6.5

TMDB Score

65% match · 20 votes

Loading VidSrc

S01 · E04

Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon

Season 1 · Apr 7, 2012 · 1h 0m

What do Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have in common? They are both famous actors and both descend from prominent American families that have been in this country since its inception. But they share something else, too: both had ancestors who were early opponents of slavery. Bacon's Quaker ancestors repudiated slavery long before the rest of the country, in 1780. And Sedgwick's ancestor Theodore Sedgwick argued the freedom case of Elizabeth Freeman, also known as "Mumbet," in 1781 -- which helped bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts. We reveal this fact - and many others - to Sedgwick and Bacon in this episode, and learn quite a bit about slavery in the North in the process.

About the Series

Finding Your Roots poster
Documentary

Synopsis

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

First aired
March 24, 2012
Last aired
April 14, 2026
Seasons
12 seasons · 126 episodes
Status
Returning Series
Original language
English
Network
PBS

Top Billed Cast

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Self - Host

More Like This