Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gave a talk in the TLI Spotlights Series at Tanglewood on August 10. His topic was not announced in the Tanglewood summer brochure, but surely most of the enthusiastic audience came expecting to hear something about genealogy, the subject of his very successful program “Finding Your Roots,” now in its 10th season on PBS. Indeed, Gates said that it was the No. 1 non-fiction program on the network, with some four million listeners. (He also has a long history of producing informative documentaries for PBS including the music of the Black church in the United States and cultural life (especially architectural and literate) of African peoples before the arrival of European colonizers.
The depth of interest in the topic of the day was clear when he asked the audience how many had gotten their DNA tested; about half raised their hands. That number is surely larger than it would have been a decade ago, even though companies offering to assist in genealogical research and DNA tracking already existed before that time, and collections of genealogical materials have long been assembled in libraries and official offices all over the world.
Gates began by explaining where his particular interest in genealogy arose—not surprisingly with questions about himself and his family background. He grew up in a town that was racially mixed, and (as he eventually discovered) 50% of his own DNA comes from white ancestors. This was to be expected for people descended from former slaves, since their ancestors had no way to resist unwanted approaches by their masters. And it was all but impossible to trace the family history of people descended from that tradition because their forebears were almost never mentioned by name (only by gender and age) in the population records of the day.
When he first got interested in this question, and knowing many African-Americans who wondered where in Africa their ancestors had come, Gates proposed a documentary on African-American lives for public television, choosing many of the most famous figures in the country to attract viewer interest. At the time, very few of them had any idea of their heritage. He explained that Oprah Winfrey, one of the first prospects for the program, insisted that she was Zulu—which was not possible because slavers never seized people from South Africa, where they were resident.
After the program was released, Gates learned—to his surprise—that many white people also had little idea of their family backgrounds, especially if parents or grandparents fused different nationalities or cultures. At the same time, the increasing availability of DNA analysis as a means of connecting people of differing, or unknown, genetic backgrounds became a basis for clarifying individual research questions—and the combination of archival research in historical collections on paper with the addition of new information traced through DNA became the basic idea for “Finding Your Roots.”
As regular viewers know, the program usually has two guests—very well-known figures in American life, most often actors or musicians, with diverse backgrounds. As the program became more popular, many of them have written to ask if Gates and his team or researchers could solve family mysteries for them. Each program is shaped partly by how extensively these questions can be answered, and what specific surprises arise in each guest’s background. A number of these moments, some deeply moving, were shown in film clips.
After the talk, Prof. Gates was joined by Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor of English at Boston University as moderator, posing questions from the audience. These ranged from “How can I start doing genealogical research on my family” to “Which nationalities are the most difficult to untangle?” Asked about how much time was required to research, record, and edit each program of “Finding Your Roots,” Gates estimated roughly six months each, though with considerable difference depending on the location of research information. (Obviously they need to work on several projects at a time.)
As the show has gone on for a number of years an additional element was added. Each guest’s DNA has been compared to the results of each of the previous guests, revealing unsuspected family connections with others who have appeared previously. Sometimes these are rather surprising, but it illustrate the far-flung web that DNA has woven between people all over the world. Gates referred to this fact in his closing remarks, that DNA research has shown us that all human beings share about 99.9 percent of themselves with everyone else on earth.