I owe the tree an apology, I meant to post Louis Gates's "African American Lives" that aired on PBS last night. It is a 2 part series and will conclude next Wednesday (check local listings). I am inspired to go dig up my family tree.


It chronicles the exhilarating search by nine black Americans, including Professor Gates, for their ancestry. Of course, it adds to the documentary's excitement that many of the nine are serious celebrities, including Quincy Jones, Chris Tucker, Bishop T. D. Jakes, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. The others the surgeon Ben Carson, the astronaut Mae Jemison and the Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot are no less distinguished.

As Professor Gates points out on the first of tonight's two episodes, most African-Americans lack complete family trees, and he admits to envying American friends who can find records of their relatives' immigration through Ellis Island. It turns out that a discontinuity the making of an exception is, in fact, one of the first components of family life that Professor Gates uncovers in interviews with his guests. For many, that break seems to be the starting point of their identities.

Ms. Winfrey tells of watching her grandmother boil clothes in a black pot: " 'One day you're going to have to learn this for yourself,' she said to me."

"I watched and looked like I was paying attention," Ms. Winfrey says, "but distinctly recall a feeling that: No, I'm not. No, I'm not. That this will not be my life."

Acknowledging that these celebrities live very differently from their parents and grandparents (Ms. Winfrey's father is a barber), Professor Gates, who recruits various historians and geneticists throughout the documentary, begins by reconnecting his guests with the 20th century. For this part, he uses photographs and fairly thorough documentation, as well as oral histories. The stories from the last century of perseverance, rape, murder, flight, poverty, humor, ingenuity are each worth a novel.

But then the series turns to the 19th century, in which many of the discoveries represent revelations to the guests themselves. Professor Gates, for example, has always believed that a white slave owner named Samuel Brady bought his great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, a house; Brady was also said to be the father of her children. What he finds in his research is quite different and still more intriguing.

Ms. Winfrey discovers that an ancestor of hers owned land after the Civil War, and had a school for black children on it. She is astonished and moved to discover that education has been a priority of her family for more than a century. Equally striking revelations turn up in the family trees of the others. Professor Gates's laughing and tearful discussions with the guests, as they all try to sort out what having a family history might mean to them, are some of the best scenes in the show.



The series which visits 18th-century America and finally Africa grows progressively more fascinating. The quest and the detective story sharpen, and the documentary turns riveting. I couldn't stop watching. When the guests all swab the inside of their cheeks for DNA, and subsequently learn where exactly their ancestors came from, you're on the edge of your seat. A teaser: one of the "African Americans" turns out to be largely European, and another is considerably East Asian