Film directors, producers, and screenwriters Lee Daniels and Rebecca Hall are guests on the eighth season’s premiere of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“There were certain things we just didn’t talk about with our grandparents,” says Lee Daniels. In this episode, “Hidden Genes,” the co-creator of Empire is stunned to hear the truth about his father’s bloodline. “It explains why he would never give me information about my grandfather…why my grandfather would never give me information about his father,” says Daniels. Host Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces the origin of the Daniels name and their ancestors’ enslavement in North Carolina.
Dr. Gates also traces the ancestry of Lee Daniels’s maternal line, examining a rumor about a murder in the family. DNA testing reveals an unexpected kinship that Daniels shares to a past guest of the show.
London-born Rebecca Hall, writer, director, and producer the critically acclaimed Passing, is the daughter of the late film and opera director Sir Peter Reginald Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing. Dr. Gates looks into a claim made by Rebecca Hall’s maternal grandfather of descent from Dakota chiefs; however, her grandfather gave different stories about his birthplace and ethnicity. The Ewings are traced from Lincoln County, Tennessee, and back to Maryland where an ancestor fought as a Revolutionary War patriot.
Finding Your Roots airs Tues., January 4, 2022, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS.