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

Thx, but I know

We all know.😑

Everyone knows

I didn't know 🤷

Minnie had an amazing voice.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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?

this video cuts out the part where she finds out Johnny had Black ancestors too!

I think that's really cool - how bad ass!

you should start meditating and connect with her

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.

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.

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.

What an amazing story

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 freakin LOVE Daria!

@@girrl88 my avatar says “…whatever.” 😃

@@erinmalone2669 la la la la la

Yeah. It is

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

He also found out he is a quarter African American. No Italian.

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

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

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.

don't check her profile. It's just an ad for low quality porn sites.

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

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.)

🙁 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.

What state were they in? That could have been why they had a better opportunity?

Wow!

If that is true then you are my distant cousin on the Jefferson side

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

Your point????

Wow!

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 .

Oh no I’m so sorry

Well yeah there’s DNA now.

What do you think slavery was?

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!

I love that movie .