Tony Award-winning stars Audra McDonald and Mandy Patinkin are guests on Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots, airing Tues., April 27, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS. As Gates explains, the two Broadway stars meet a cast of characters on their family trees that are “every bit as dramatic as the people they’ve played on stage.”
Mandy Patinkin knew nothing about the background of his maternal grandfather, whom he only met once. He learns that his grandfather’s family came to New York in 1900 from the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement where genealogists trace the Patinkin’s Snitovsky and Goldberg ancestry to great-great-great-grandparents. The actor’s Patinkin (originally Patinka) family also came to the U.S. in the early 1900s, joining a relative who had arrived years earlier. He also learns the fate of relatives in Poland at the time of the Nazi invasion. “I feel more alive from this journey than I’ve ever imagined,” says Patinkin.
Audra McDonald was interested in seeing how far genealogists could go with her pedigree. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Hardy Jones, a distinguished educator, was much revered by his family. It’s believed that the Joneses came from Washington, D.C., but the search for their past came to an end. However, genealogists were able to trace another branch of her maternal ancestry to Kellogg fourth great-grandparents in Georgia, extending her lineage to the early 1800s.
The McDonald lineage, too, is traced. They came to California from Mississippi as a part of The Great Migration out of the Deep South by African Americans. Audra McDonald’s DNA shows a significant match with a previous guest from Finding Your Roots that causes her to say, “No way! I kissed my cousin!”
Photos: Courtesy of McGee Media