Sometimes, you're better off not finding your roots. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the most disturbing revelations made by celebs on this genealogy documentary series. Our countdown includes Michael Douglas, Lena Dunham, Tig Notaro, and more! Have YOU ever made a startling discovery in your family’s history? Let us know in the comments below.
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Have YOU ever made a startling discovery in your family’s history? Let us know below, and check out our video of the Top 10 Shocking Reveals on Finding Your Roots - kzhead.info/sun/qqqpn9qZr6Z5ha8/bejne.html
Finding out my mom wasn't the oldest child. She has an older sister whose children think your mother never married and she never had kids. And will not let there mother give you your grandmother's ring that should have gone to your mother when she was still alive.
I’m a descendant of the man who composed the music for Silent Night
Standing onboard the USS Missouri and realizing my grandfather was there during the battle of Iwo Jima. He had told me about how a kamikaze plane had hit the aft end of the ship. The pilot survived only to pull a pistol out from his pocket and end his life.
My Great-Grandfather(x11 I think) who emigrated to Canada from France in 1625 was murdered. He's murderer was caught but did not get sent to jail. Instead he was ordered to pay restitution of an unknown amount to my Great-Grandmother(11).
I found a connection to the Salem Massachusetts witch hunt. Her name was Paris also parish. One ancestors found to have been born in Africa
If anyone doesn't know, Maya Rudolph is also the daughter of the late Minnie Riperton, who lost her life to breast cancer at age 31 when Maya was about 7. Minnie Riperton was a singer, with a five octave range, best known for the song "Lovin' You" from 1975.
Thx, but I know
We all know.😑
Everyone knows
I didn't know 🤷
Minnie had an amazing voice.
In college, I learned from my dad that my paternal grandfather was supposed to fight in the Battle of Okinawa (one of the bloodiest battles of WWII) but broke his foot before getting deployed, so instead he was an army mechanic in Berlin who helped to rebuild a village that was decimated by the Nazis. It’s insane to think I owe my entire existence to a guy breaking his foot in the 1940s.
My grandfather was sent to Alaska during WW2 instead of the Pacific by some distant relative who recognized our very unique last name. He never would have made it in the pacific. He was over 30 and a short fat salesman. I found this out one day when I was a teenager complaining about nepotism.
@@cruisepaigenice corruption story.
@@cruisepaigeWow, what an amazing positive way to learn about being judgemental..
Both my grandparents ended up escaping the Nazi by faking/inducing injuries. My maternal grandfather caused open sores which temporarily got him transferred from a labor camp to a clinic where he was held checking for infections disease. He escaped custody and made his way to a merchant ship in port and escaped the territory. My paternal grandfather was assigned to do accounting work for the German army. Over about two months he worked to convince the office manager to let him go get a faked tooth pain pulled in the nearest city with a 3 day pass. He used that to get as far west as possible and hid for a few days while Patton pushed through the occupied Netherlands. He then ended up getting assigned as a civilian medic assisting the population following Patton’s unit’s eventually earning the opportunity to go to the U.S. after the war was over and a reference to get a job with the U.S. government. If either of those circumstances changed in the slightest I would not be here.
One time in high school, we were doing a project on WW2 and some of the students decided to bring momentos relating to the war and their families. One student revealed that her grandfather was a Nazi officer, at this point I had to reveal that my grandfather fought for the Allies, but i also surprised them by revealing that he was still alive, 90yrs old at the time (2009). And i actually got to tell him that story and his face lit up with joy.
Grandparents love when you acknowledge their history.
Crazy he thought it was a good idea
@@kellzkardashian1132 denying reality is the same as lying
@@kellzkardashian1132 Why would it be a bad idea to reveal that your grandfather fought for the allies? Both my grandfathers did, too.
@@yippee8570 the nazi gramps, not yours lol
My maternal great grandfather was Scottish and my maternal great grandmother was black. My maternal great grandfather had to pretend to be biracial in order to marry my great grandmother. He changed all his legal documents from white to “mulatto”. Race switching was pretty common for interracial couples to circumvent the laws against mixed marriages.
Because laws never stop love. When people love each other, laws aren't going to stop the relationship. So blessings to your family line.
Same. Exact same. Were they from Virginia?
Scottish is a nationality. Black is a colour of an object… why do u people think black is a nationality.. u make more sense saying one is white one is black or one is scottish and one is of ethnic decent
@@doyadirty3804 Scottish implies white unless otherwise stated. You know that. Let's not be disingenuous.
@@doyadirty3804 "u people"....?
7:10 That is SUCH a classy move on the part of Dr. Gates giving Madison a briefing on what was discovered about his dad before the camera rolls.
I mean that’s HUGE bombshell. I can’t imagine having to find that and then having to break that news
He did the same with Kerry Washington
He did the same thing to LL Cool J
I wouldn't call it "classy" so much as "decency".
Did he do it for anyone with white skin?
Edward Norton’s ancestor being Pocahontas is also pretty awful. Her life was harsh, short, and tragic. It is nothing like the Disney film. She didn’t fall for John smith and she was only 12 years old when she was kidnapped and taken to England to be in a forced marriage. He birth name was Mataoka and she was dead by 21.
She got married when she was 17 not 12, she lived a life of wealth and privilege… she was to visit her family in Virginia but she died before the voyage.
@@andrewft31 I said she was kidnapped at 12 and forced into marriage later. Just because it was a “life of privilege” doesn’t mean a good and happy life. I forgot to mention that the first time she met John smith she was only 10, not a grown woman as Disney portrays. Also many publications that came about after her death portrayed her as submissive and falling for John smith, in addition to Disney’s portrayal serve to dehumanize indigenous women to this day. To where many are referred to Pocahontas in a sexual or demeaning way. Her legacy and the tragedy she lived through is largely forgotten and/or ignored.
@@andrewft31we don't have a lot of definitive proof about much of her life, but there are a lot of details that paint a horrifying story. Her "marriage" ( she was already married and even a mother at the time of her kidnapping) was likely a forced marriage because she was pregnant. The whole point of kidnapping her was to force her father to stand down and come to "make peace". I say it in quotes because the war had been started partially in part due to colonial men sexually abusing the native women. The fact that she had become pregnant in captivity, likely due to rape, would have destroyed that "peace". So they had her marry some rando that going by historical records she had never met before. Or at least not in any official way, which would be really odd considering she was a constantly monitored prisoner. Said Rando, John Rolf also seems to have come into some money around this time. Maybe he had been paid to do this? Even after the marriage and she was "no longer" a prisoner she was never allowed to see or contact her family. She was paraded around England like an animal though she carried herself well enough and charmed the English nobility when that she became a celebrity. Then after being suddenly sent back to England despite the aristocracy wanting more is also weird. Like maybe her handlers didn't want to risk her talking too much to anyone with authority that could be sympathetic. Then she got "sick" and died in the middle of the ocean. Not weird in itself, but she was the ONLY one recorded as having got this "mysterious illness". That is crazy weird. It's been long speculated that she had actually been poisoned. They can say she was going to finally see her family after this voyage but the fact is from the time she had been take till her "sudden and unexpected" death she had never even been allowed to have a correspondence with them let alone see them despite them not being all that far away. After landfall her "husband" wanted literally nothing to do with their "son". He literally abandoned the boy. Rolf's brother heard about him abandoning his son and was publicly disgusted by him. He, the brother ended up taking the boy in and raising him. Yes there is no proof she was raped, forced into marriage and eventually poisoned, but the stuff we do have definitive records of do indicate that as FAR more likely than the "official" story written by her captors, much of it long after her death and any chance of her talking to someone who mattered about her actual circumstances.
@@DemonEyes02Except your timing is off, Pocahontas married Rolfe in April 1614, she was kidnapped in 1609-10 which was planned out by colonists and other natives, where she was held for ransom for her father to release prisoners and items. And her son was born in January 1615. Which the time between is longer than 9 months so there isn't any way she could have been pregnant before that. There's more that happened sure, but that's common history because all we have to rely on are documents that survived and biases. The most with Pocahontas are the surviving records and some oral traditions.
@@DemonEyes02 well said 👏 In many indigenous communities she is counted among the first of the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women who continue to vanish to this day.
Fred Armison’s history was mind-blowing.
My great-great-grandmother lost custody of her kids and tried to run with them to Canada before she was arrested for kidnapping (she got them eventually after bribing her ex, first cash for the girls then land for the boys). Thirty years later, she was arrested for illegal fortune telling for her work as a trance medium. Her appeal was unsuccessful, but did get reported by newspapers across the country because her intent was to get the appellate court to rule Spiritualism as a religion. The librarian who found about the fortune telling arrest was reluctant to tell me because she wasn’t sure how I would handle it-I thought it was an amazing detail in an incredible life.
I think that's really cool - how bad ass!
you should start meditating and connect with her
To hear that a little boy who should’ve been in kindergarten with other children; playing and enjoying life was listed under a slave registry as a 5 year old male got me. That made me break down. I can’t imagine what that would be like and to see Maya, who I think is a National Treasure, react like that I hit the “ugly cry” hard!
Man, that’s the thing about genealogy. You find out some out some incredible things, both good and bad. I know most people might think of genealogy as an old person’s hobby, but I really recommend getting into it. It’s fascinating seeing who you come from and piecing together their lives.
It is definitely the people you meet when researching that make genealogy so fascinating! The successes, the tragedies, the “wow, how did THAT happen?” are all so cool. Stumbling across connections to the famous and infamous is just a bonus.
Will humble you too!
I agree. I’m 43 and have been interested in genealogy research since I was 28.
I have done my search with Ancestry (not getting anything for naming the company) awhile back, and my sister sent for info in our native country. We came to the US in the early 80s, so we don’t have any relatives here. We came from Eastern Europe, so we thought we knew where we’re from…we had quite a shock finding out a lot of our ancestry is from the Balkans and Greece. I mean we are Europeans but we don’t look like the people in our native country. We were in our 40s when we started this and funny enough it was my son who started the searches.
It has a way of showing us that we are all really just humans.
I knew Roseanne Cash’s mother was part black. Looking at her, I have an inkling it was more than a great great grandmother, but this is an imperfect history. Historians did the best they could with what they had.
this video cuts out the part where she finds out Johnny had Black ancestors too!
What breaks my heart is that most black people can only go as far back as slavery. What I would give to know more than that.
Y DNA ought to be able to go back further, as long as the paternal line was all black.
Occasionally Finding Your Roots does have a black, usually part Caribbean, celebrity who's ancestry goes further back but judging by the fact that I have only heard about it on this show, it's probably expensive
Would it blow your mind that many people of all colors can't go back more than 1 or 2 generations?
I was able to match with distant cousins in Nigeria. I messaged them and found out they were all Igbo, so i know most of my dna is Igbo. However we were not able to figure out who came to America or when. One told me "we don't even really talk about the slave trade here. They didn't pass down those stories of who was taken. We didn't even think of Americans as being our actual blood family."
True
I'm surprised, y'all didn't include LL COOL J. His mom found out she was adopted from the show
Last year I found two half-siblings through a genealogy website - a brother and a sister. We all have the same father and different mothers. None of us knew about each other. I'm the youngest of the three of us and was raised by my parents. Both of my siblings were raised in foster care. My brother was left on the doorstep of a convent and my sister was removed from her mother because of neglect. We're all in our seventies and I will be travelling internationally to meet them in a few weeks. In the meantime I set up a video chat group and our families have all met online.
What an amazing story
Scarlett Johansson finding out her Jewish relatives were murdered by nazis was also heart wrenching.
I was adopted at birth and never knew my birth parents. Back in 2021 (at age 63) I took the Ancestry test and discovered my birth parents. My mother died 13 days following my birth and my father died several years ago. I had a full blood sister who also died just before I received the results. My only recommendation is to do it sooner instead of later. HOWEVER, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER.
So sorry for your loss! My very dear friend recently found out her father, whom she never knew nor met, was murdered. However, she has found a half brother after having been a singleton all her life, so that's a blessing, at least. Poor woman, she had a horrible childhood 😞
That's really heartbreaking, yet you go on to give others advice because of your loss. I have a feeling your Mom, Dad, and Sister are very proud of you.
Sad to hear about your whole family. To die 13 days after you were born sounds like an infection or or other medical condition following childbirth. I've seen it happen. I hope your adoptive family help fill a void in your life and treated you decently.
Maya Rudolph's reaction to her ancestor being a slave was so heartbreaking, that I wanted to reach through the screen and comfort her.
All of our ancestors were enslaved at some point though. I'm half Irish. My ancestors were enslaved too.
They had to stop taping because of Pharell. I don't know why he was shocked that his ancestors were slaves. Black people already knew this. Roots, the mini series helped us to see a little bit what our ancestors went through.
@@mlynettepinky595 Plus all of us have slaves in our family history. My own ancestors were taken as slaves by the Ottomans. In fact more whites were taken into slavery than were blacks.
@@DonKeecock Does that make slavery okay? Does that mean People of color in America are not free to mourn for their ancestors?
I’ve noticed the crew usually makes tissues available when they’re filming these segments of the interview.
I learned before he passed that my father faked being deaf for the last 3 years of his life so my mother would stop talking to him.
Finding your Roots is a great show.
I freakin LOVE Daria!
@@girrl88 my avatar says “…whatever.” 😃
@@erinmalone2669 la la la la la
Yeah. It is
We discovered that my Grandfather was married three times and divorced zero. ;)
The very first day I got my DNA results on Ancestry, I uncovered a family secret. I shared the most dna with this woman whom I never heard of. With some sleuthing, I found out she was the daughter of my grandparents' best friends. So basically, my grandfather got his best friend's wife pregnant. My gramma was also pregnant with my uncle at that time.
Wow, I'm sorry for that. How do you feel about your grandfather now?
Something similar happened in my family, but it wasn’t my grandpa who did it. It was one my maternal grandpa’s daughter-in-laws who hooked up with her friends’ husband and had a daughter. The husband was a distant cousin in my dad’s family. This all happened before my parents even met. I’m still confused by it all.
@@Ah_Be While i loved my Grampa, he was a drinker, partier, and not a good husband to my gramma, who was my idol. I was shocked, but not surprised.
@@karami8844 confusing for sure! My head hurts reading this lol!
@@karami8844confusing
Genealogy is so fascinating! It’s incredible how many stories we carry within us.
The Negro ancestry is visible in Miss Cash's mother. Miss Cash, your mother was a beautiful woman. Don't let ignorant people try to make you feel some type of way.
You got the right idea, but we call em Blacks now, Cathleen!
@@rebeccaporter9411i remembered Madea as soon as i read this😂😂😂
Pretty sure we don't use the term "Negro" any more.
@@rebeccaporter9411My birth certificate tells me I'm a Negro. Had to show my grandchildren so they understand it's not a slur.
Same! My younger brother, born 2 years later, was listed as Black. Lol.@@tandt7694
I loved finding out both my great grandfathers on my mom's side were outlaws... my grandfather's dad rode with Pancho Villa's gang.😅
Roseanne Cash's mother, Vivian, was stunningly beautiful!
Whoa. Joe Manganiello looks just like BOTH his Armenian and German relatives pictured 😲
He also found out he is a quarter African American. No Italian.
I wany to see a video about celebrities who were unknowingly related to each other. Like Carol Burnett and Bill Haier
Bernie Sanders and Larry David were the funniest but I also loved that RuPaul and Senator Corey Booker are related. The least unexpected one was Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon. Both came from old Connecticut families so it was kind of inevitable. Not related but it turned out that Jeff Daniels' ancestor was a Salem Witch prosecutor and one person he arrested for witchcraft was Claire Danes' ancestor.
You have to watch the whole episode People who found out they were cousins 1. Larry David and Bernie Sanders 2. Julie Roberts and Ed Norton 3. Angela Bassett and Rosanne Cash
My 3x great grandfather was a witness to his best friend's stabbing death on a bridge in Pittsburgh in 1854. The newspaper articles recounting the crime and subsequent trail are sensational, to say the least. My 2x great grandfather was named for the murdered friend, which became a legacy name in the family, but we never knew the origin until the old newspaper reports were discovered.
I found a sister that was born 2 months after I was born. My father wasn't the only person in the family to screw around, his older brother did the same. I found and met some cousins, we have become very close. My older half brother never knew who his father was, my mother got drunk with a couple GI's from a nearby Army base one night and ended up pregnant. About 3 years ago he found his father and 3 siblings, they live in South Carolina. He finally met them last year, he looks more like his father that his 2 brothers.
I always thought that I was just French-Canadian and Native American, but recently found out that I am part French Basque and part Scandinavian. Both are are like 1% or so, but it still changed things in the way I thought.
The ancestors of Joe Manganiello was really heartbreaking...
My mother and her siblings had to attend school with the people whose ancestors owned our ancestors. To make it worse we are related to that family by blood
🙁 Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me.
wow
So they are your family? Isn't it better to embrace them then if you can? Otherwise it's like ripping out half of your ancestors?
You and they can't change the past, however you can make the future better.
@@sarahudson108, yeah, that's what I think. Both sides of the family are really in it together and can aim to make things better in the future. The past can't be undone and certainly not by people who were not there, but you can try to make things better from now on.
I'm glad he told Joe Madison about his Father before they went on air😢 Maya Rudolph & Pharrell Williams finding out about their ancestors in slavery😢
I learned that both sides of my family Canadian/German fought against each other in the Second World War. My Canadian great Uncle did not make it back home 😢
My cousin joe was in the italian army in ww1 and got shot in the ankle by a German at 15 years old. He lived to be 100 years old and his ankle never healed!
Just last week, I discovered that I have relatives going back in Virginia for a couple of centuries. I had never heard discussion of this Virginia line, which produced my paternal grandmother. The early end of that line, revealed to me last week, includes a woman (my great great great great grandmother) named Sally, who died in Virginia 1835. That ended one night of reading. The next morning I decided to investigate Sally Hemings state and date of death. As it turns out, Sally Hemings died in Virginia...in 1835. This is not conclusive, but it is interesting.
If that is true then you are my distant cousin on the Jefferson side
My great grandfather died from a "shotgun blast to the face" after showing up at his estranged third wife's house at 2am. No one in my family bothered to volunteer that information.
People finding out they have African ancestry is NOT disturbing 😑
Thank you.
I agree with you. Who cares what your genetic admix is? If anyone does have a problem with it it is Their problem.
It's probably casual thoughtlessness
They said it was “disturbing” simply because at the time the husband insisted there was no African ancestry and all records agreed with that claim, it turned out to be untrue. They claimed much more often how disturbing it was to find out about slavery owners, spies and Nazi affiliates.
Thank you
I found out i was 9% African! I'm mostly southern italian. We knew due to wars and proximity there's lots of African blood in sicily.
Rosanne Cash mother looks Black. Johnny Cash would tell people she looked like that because she was Italian. He was wrong😂 The show also revealed Johnny Cash also had sub Sahara DNA. If his fans knew the truth, they would have had a fit. They were already sending him hate mail because his wife.
He said that to protect her mother…
Shows you how white Italians were considered by the population back then.
@@lillyess385 Southern Italians were once very dark, they have been white washed over the years. By fudge me Cash's wife was Beyonce Black.
I have friends who are Italian. They're afraid to take the DNA tests because they know they'll find some black blood in their ancestry and it will set some people off. The grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated to the US within the past 75 years or so.
She was forced to pass for white
Some of my family were very early, like 1600's, colonists. Because they all settled in New England and New York I assumed we escaped the slaveholder part of US history. Nope. Recently I found out that some who were among the first settlers on Long Island were slaveowners. I even read a copy of one's will where he left each of his slave women to one of his daughters. He had one more daughter than he had slave so he willed the first born daughter of one of the slaves to his last daughter, to be given to her household upon weaning. The males slaves were unnamed and lumped in with the livestock left to his son.
Slaveholding used to be almost as common aming rich people in the North as it later was among rich people in the South. Just an uncomfortable part of American history.
@@vic5015 Yes it is, just like French monasteries in Canada buying captives from Indigenous tribes and holding them as slaves. It wasn't chattel slavery like white people held black people, but it was still slavery. If the slave had family with some money, they would be able to buy back their family member. One ancestor who lived in western Massachusetts was captured and enslaved for 3 years before buying himself back. 15 years later, his wife, son, and DIL were captured. The wife died en route to Montreal and the DIL gave birth to 2 children before he was able to buy them all back. It was a very lucrative business for the monks.
at the time of independence in 1776, slsvery was legal in *all* 13 colonies. That's just a fact. My understanding is that there's a little-known plaque in NYC that marks the spot where newly arrived slaves were auctioned off. It was one of, if not *the* largest, slave market in the colonies.
@@vic5015 More important than Independence was when the Constitution was enacted in 1789 and by that time 5 states made slavery illegal: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont also did in 1777 but they were still an independent country, not one of the 13 colonies.
Yeah, I had that same thought when I found out my family was from those same regions at similar times. I think of it as geographical smugness, thinking that, since we weren’t from the South, I didn’t have to worry about that. But, not only did I have slaveholders on the tree, I also discovered that one 8th great grandfather, a New England sea captain, had helmed a slave ship at least once in his career. (He had filed a report about being boarded by pirates on July 4, 1717, coming back to Boston from Barbados. They took “forty hogsheads of rum, several barrels of sugar, and a Negro man,” who was obviously part of his cargo, not his crew.)
Through a DNA site I found a half-sister that my father didn't know existed - from when he was stationed in Germany in 1952. Also learned that my maternal side had a feud as well as moonshiners.
I learned that some of my ancestors were Mennonites (spiritual cousins to the Amish) and came over because of William Penn.
These celebrities are so fortunate to have genealogists look into their family history. That's an amazing thing despite what may come up. I'm also assuming for free.
That show almost always ...gobsmacks me....or brings me almost to tears.
On my mother's side we had Thomas Mayhew on Martha's Vineyard. He knew sign language bc large deaf population a sign language was developed( different from ASL, but close bc kids often went to Hartford,CT school for the Deaf--I'm an ASL interpreter. I thought I was the first Signer, but I was a few hundred years later. Thomas came over on the "June flower" Family joke, not the Mayflower, but the next one.
I found out my 3x-great-grandfather was accused in a triple murder and hung by a lynch mob.
Christina Applegate learning that her grandmother (or great however many times over) was charged with adultery for leaving an abusive relationship into another man's arms also broke my heart.
Unfortunately, a lot of our ancestors were slave owners or slaves, it’s a big part of history no matter which country you’re from. But their actions don’t define us and we should work each day so that slavery will not happen ever again
Yes, we can’t change the past but we can choose to not repeat it.
@@Lily_of_the_Forest exactly!
My 7th great grandfather fought in the revolutionary war . His whole family moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania because they didn't believe in slavery. It really makes me proud of them . The reason being they were Irish and prosecuted for their religion so they knew . Wish more people were like that .
No. The rich were the slave owners. Others were overseers and enablers. The others rented us from the slave owner or were paid to hunt us down.
As a Senior citizen, the older I get the more I long to know the history of my own family...It would mean the 'world' to me as I grew up with a certain youthful sense of not 'belonging' from as far back as being a very young child...I hope these celebrities appreciate & realize what a privilege they've been handed ...
Familysearch is a free on-line site for ancestry information
It's not too hard to get going in genealogy - your local library may have classes and people who can help.
Family Search is free. You just need to know your birth dates, hopefully your mother's to get get you started.
@@gd8597 Thank you kindly for your thoughtful suggestion...I very much appreciate it!☀
@@floramondecar9884 Thanks so much for your encouragement!
I made so many "startling discoveries" about my family's history that I made the choice to stop looking into it. Too disturbing.
Of course i agree. Happy thursday morning, Phoebe. Take care and God bless you. Greetings from Colombia to you as well.
I think the most shocking thing I discovered in my tree was a DNA mystery: My maternal 4th Great-Grandfather had two wives. His first was my biological 4th Great-Grandmother who sadly died young, and his second wife had the last name Fish. However, when I was double checking this information on Ancestry (as I did a DNA test too), I saw I had DNA matches with the second wive's ancestors. This freaked me out for a while, and I couldn't understand why. I did more digging, and I believe I know why: My maternal 3rd Great-Grandmother (in a different line) had an affair with someone, and the father was never known. I believe one of Fish's ancestors is the father. I tested it, and it seems legit. That blew my mind too XD
Wow!
Us old Gen X'ers who listened to the stories of our great grand parents or even our grand parents heard stories that would horrify the kids today
Our family lore was that we were descended from Betsy Ross; my aunt is a genealogy sleuth and she found it to be true!
I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to explore my dad's heritage before he passed. Unfortunately we weren't able to find the whole story together. My father is the descendant of Hungarian Jews. He never knew this. The paternal side of my dad's family were wiped out in the Holocaust. I'm so proud of my heritage and hope to visit Hungary to discover more
I'm beginning to think that trauma, difficultly, injustice, and violence was simply the norm for centuries. I feel that now, in our relatively comfortable lives we glorify the "horrible" conditions of the past as if it was unusual. The "shock" of discovering this really comes across as disingenuous or just painfully naive to me now.
People sometimes think that their ancestors were good people. Depends on what was considered a good person.
I'm descended from some woman who lived in Africa two million years ago.
forget race for a minute, if someone were to see a distant family membe noted as just an age and with no name in a census record. I am sure they would feel the same, it would be heartbreaking to think that their family member was not seen as a person, just as a thing...
The sadder part is that you would have to suggest that others forget race in order to have empathy and compassion regarding that reality.
@@TheTrueTLC Profoundly layered
Regardless of who you are, where you live, your colour, race, religion, socio-economic status, Your culture, and/or any pretentions you have we are all descendants of Survivors. So many people, including whole families, have been wiped from history. Disease like the plague, influenza, typhoid and cholera, have killed millions of people over centuries. Natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, famine. Humans have also been the cause of killing off whole bloodlines from Romans, viking, Mongols, Crusades, Huns right through to Hitler. Our ancestors Survived and they live on in our genes. Be proud of that.
@MsMojo, In the 25 yrs of doing my own research, I discovered that my Paternal 5th Great Grandparents and my Maternal 5th Grandmother were killed by Natives during the French and Indian War. I detail my Paternal Line in my recent book "The Cobler Family Story From Palatinate Germany to 20th Century America".
I was able through DNA trace my paternal family back to Maryland. The state of Maryland was the main hub for slave ships. Usually you get off in Maryland and from there you go to wherever the family you’re sold to lives. My Dad’s family was sold to a family in Mississippi as soon as we got to Maryland from Nigeria. We’ve been in Natchez, Mississippi ever since with only a handful of us living in other states.
I learned that an ancestor had fought in the American Revolution. My father was vehemently critical of the D.A.R. I joked with my sisters about how they could now apply for membership, that way we could verify whether someone could actually spin in their grave.
Loved the Korean-Japanese grandpa story...
All of this makes me want to learn more about my family roots!😮
Absolutely fascinating episodes each week. What I would give to be on that show. As a child my parents used to say- "We'll never really know who our family is, since nobody in America is actually from America". That has stayed with me for decades. One can only go so far with tracing their roots on their own, but this show has access to materials we'll never get our hands on.
Love Henry Louis Gates, Jr!
Maya Rudolph is half African American. She was born in the South. What did she expect?
Your ignorance is amazing. Not forget the fact that a lot of history specially with slaves is either not written down, or only told two stories or half truths. She may not have known a lot of our history because her family didn’t really tell her or chose not to tell her. and you come up as a white person Who wants to deny someone the history? I don’t understand why she was feeling the way she was.
My great grandma threatened her only son, her youngest child, with death, if he didn't leave town that very night. It was in a note laid on his pillow he found after he had been out with his friends. He was 18 at the time and they were living in Texas. She had disguised her writing and he didn't know it was her threatening him. He scared enough that he did leave without saying a word to anyone. Must've been some note!
Wow!
My great great grandfather impregnated his daughter and then fled from the state to Oregon where they did not care what he did in another state. His daughter was raised like it was her fault and abused her whole life until she met my great grandfather. She had 4 children before killing herself.
I took a DNA test and found out my father is ALIVE, and I am 1/4 Native! I have now moved in with my tribe. I hadn't even heard of this tribe before... growing up, I was always told I was Cherokee! I am thousands of miles from where I grew up!
Probably not a good idea to share that on the Internet because people will tell you that's not enough ancestry to be considered native
@nyla27855 lmao who cares what people on the internet think? My family loves me and I'm an enrolled Tribal member! The internet doesn't know jack. I'm happy to be myself!
Interesting that you don't mention this part: "In February 2021, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the show Finding Your Roots, featured Rosanne Cash as a guest. His researchers had studied both sides of her parents' families. They confirmed her mother Vivian Liberto's paternal Sicilian ancestry, documented for 300 years in Cefalù, Sicily. Vivian’s grandfather Rosario Liberto arrived in New Orleans in 1895 and migrated to San Antonio, Texas. There he married an Italian woman from his hometown, and founded what became a chain of successful Italian grocery stores".
Slavery was / is in every country not just America fyi
Your point????
This is one of the best shows on TV. Such a dream to have your history read!
In 1996 I started doing genealogy because I wanted to open a business and get a small business loan with the benefit of being part Indian, 1/8. I had always been told that my parents from Kentucky and Tennessee, had some Cherokee Indian. In my research I found out that my seventh great grandmother Patience Spencer was a relative of George Washington. Throughout my life I had also been told that there was Welsh royalty in my family. A huge fan of Princess Diana, in 1997 when she was killed I read everything I could about her and found out that she too was related to George Washington. I put her family tree, my family tree and George Washington‘s family tree together and found out that she was my 17th cousin three times removed! The funny thing was that all this research was to find my Cherokee heritage which never showed up in DNA nor any records.
These aren't really "dark".
I'm doing mine now and so far I've found out that I had ancestors that were sisters who own a bar and land for atleast 30 prior to 1867. That was unheard of for free black women back in those days
What state were they in? That could have been why they had a better opportunity?
Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. But the awful truth can be good, too. Act accordingly.
Yes. My DNA testing in 2021 showed me that I have both Native American and Jewish ancestors as well as Northern European and Scottish Highlander!
Michael Douglas was like wow my ancestors were criminals...not too bad. Kinda cool lol
I think one important thing this shows is you can't just look at someone who is "white" or "Black" and think you know who their ancestors were. Many people literally have ancestors who were oppressors and other ancestors who were the oppressed.
I probably would have put Pharrell Williams' appearance at the top of the list. I watched that episode, and he was so overcome with emotion that they paused filming and came back to it later. IIRC Dr. Gates said that was the first time that had happened.
MsMojo the only place where you can still get that lovely AI voice AND keep the vocal fry.
Sunny Hostin discovering that her ancestors were slave owners is easily number one. Truly hilarious
If there’s one thing you can count on for Ms Mojo videos, it is that they will narrate over most of the video instead of playing the actual audio
Omg these where actually wild 😮
Just wish I could afford to have my genealogy done. Always been interested in finding out who my ancestors were
You can start very easily online through one of the genealogy sites with the knowledge you have about your parents and grandparents.
@@LilRoseMadder unfortunately the knowledge I have is practically nil
That makes it very rough. I hope you can someday have some measure of success.
@@kiciaharleyofalabama6105If you are in the 🇺🇸 and able to trace back to 1950, you can start searching. Those census records are now available.
@@kiciaharleyofalabama6105if you know your parents names it shouldn't be to hard . Go to family search and look pretty sure it's free . Ancestry and family search are my go to .
Using Ancestry i found out that my 24th great grandparents were Henry Ii and Eleanor of Aquitaine, so that the movie The Lion in Winter is home movies!
I love that movie .
What I don't understand is why Maya was so surprised. After all, her mother was African American.
She is an actress 🤷🏾♀️
So tone deaf and insensitive.
@@pamelajuniel3151 So judgmental and overly emotional!
She wasn’t surprised she was hurt, it’s not a good feeling to know that your blood was treated like property and not a person
@@cinemasquare20 Ok,but as an African American we all know that somewhere in our bloodline we have relatives that were treated like that! And after that came the Jim Crow era, and we STILL face racism and discrimination! Some people don't even know that one of the first things Trump did when he took office was to dismantle Obama's Fair Housing Rule(Biden restored it)which aimed to combat racial discrimination in the housing market.Trump was sued twice for housing discrimination, himself! I'm not insensitive to the knowledge,but most Black people have grown up with that knowledge. My husband's mother is white, and his father is Black,but him and his siblings know they are descendants of slaves on his father's side.
My fourth cousin, Joseph Cracraft, is an MIA soldier from the Civil War.
I feel so bad for many people who had awful ancestors from the past.
under that assumption everyone cant trace their ancestors from their past and find someone aweful.
We all have awful ancestors, but the sins of the father do not dictate the character of the child. We have to acknowledge who our ancestors were, without feeling excessive shame-or pride, for that matter-because their actions belong to them, as ours belong to us.
@@SiansoneaYES!
@@Siansoneasuccinct and freeing!
My brother and I (no relation,) were both black market babies. There's no "Finding Your Roots" for victims of human trafficking, tho...
Oh no I’m so sorry
Well yeah there’s DNA now.
What do you think slavery was?
I'm impressed
My mother’s paternal origins are a bit of a mystery, but through a DNA test we discovered a previously unknown Sicilian side from him! We had no idea about this!
I thought I was a turnip, and learned I was an eggplant!
I'm adopted, so I only know a little bit about my original family tree. But in my adopted family, I found out that my paternal grandmother was related to Robert E. Lee. Which was a bit strange when I first heard about it. 😅
Both my patents are tri racials. In research we found out my moms ancestor owned by dads. His daughters testimony help him wim his freedom in court. He was originally Bantu from what is now Angola. I will pay myself, thank you very much!
Yeah, I'm related to Winston Churchill and King Henry the 8th. Yet, I don't feel noble. Just poor.