Actors Brendan Fraser and Valerie Bertinelli are guests on “Forever Young,” an episode of Finding Your Roots, hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Although Brendan Fraser knew that his mother’s roots were Irish, he didn’t know when they immigrated to the U.S. Dr. Gates’s genealogists found the actor’s great-great-grandfather, Patrick Devine, arrived on American shores as an eleven-year-old in 1853, having fled the Potato Famine. Fraser also learns about a branch of his paternal family tree in Austria in the 1700s.
Valerie Bertinelli’s paternal grandfather immigrated to America from Italy—leaving behind a secret. In the U.S., he was a coalminer in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The actress’s maternal Chambers ancestors lived in Cecil County, Maryland, and her great-great-grandfather went to Brazil in the 1870s.
Finding Your Roots airs Tues., January 9, on PBS at 8 p.m. (ET).