Actors Billy Crudup and Tamera Mowry are guests on Finding Your Roots, hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., airing April 4, 2023, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS.
“Billy knew almost nothing about his father’s roots beyond the fact that they lay in North Carolina,” says Gates. Through his grandmother, the actor descends from a North Carolina enslaver named Asa Parham. A fifth great-grandfather was a Revolutionary War-era patriot ancestor named Nathan Boddie who lived in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. Through Crudup’s maternal line, the actor learns of his descent from a Hessen-born shoemaker who sailed to New York in 1857.
Tamera Mowry hears the story of her maternal great-grandfather’s immigration to the U.S. from the Bahamas. One of her ancestors, as a nine-year-old girl, was enslaved by a British baron. Of her paternal roots, Mowry discovers she descends from Mayflower passenger William Brewster.
“I have blood that started it, and I have blood that was enslaved by it,” says the actress of her mixed ancestry.