Singers Ciara and Alanis Morissette are Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s guests on the tenth season premiere of Finding Your Roots.
“Both came to me knowing almost nothing about their ancestors,” says Dr. Gates.
Ciara learns about her great-grandparents who lived in the heart of Harlem, N.Y., and were a part of the Great Migration from the Deep South. She descends from Aaron Gardner, born about 1830 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Researchers discovered a paternity issue for one of the singer’s great-grandfathers, a mystery solved by genetic genealogist CeCe Moore.
Alanis Morissette learns about her maternal Jewish ancestry in Hungary. “I think I found out that I was Jewish in my late twenties,” the singer says. Gates also traces her paternal Moricet/Morissette roots in 1640s Quebec, Canada.
The show airs Tues., Jan. 2, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS.
Photo credits: Ciara (DFree/Shutterstock), Alanis Morissette (s_buckley/Shutterstock)