Actors David Duchovny and Richard Kind are Dr. Henry Louis Gates’s guests on Finding Your Roots. “David and Richard grew up knowing that their roots trace back to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe,” says Gates. “But that’s about all they knew, because when their families immigrated a great deal of history was lost, destroyed, or willfully obscured.”
David Duchovny’s paternal ancestors were rarely mentioned when he was growing up. His grandfather, a newspaper reporter, was born in a region of the Russian empire that’s now in northern Ukraine. They were dairy farmers who went to the Middle East before immigrating to America.
Richard Kind’s maternal great-grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1896, was a peddler who became a well-to-do crayon manufacturer before being murdered. “My relatives were in the crayon business…that’s nuts!” says the actor. For Kind’s paternal roots, Gates’s team of genealogists traced the bloodline back six generations.
Finding Your Roots airs Tues., February 14, 2023, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS.