[MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you so much. RootsTech, my God, give it up for yourselves. This is amazing. [APPLAUSE] No, but we cannot go forward without once again thanking and giving it up for Natalia. She sings like an angel. [APPLAUSE] You know, I saw Coco, and I was so moved because of the tradition of, if you keep the image of an ancestor alive, that they'll never die. An African tradition has a similar custom, which is if you continue to speak the name of your ancestor, they will never die. And if you think about it, that's what unites us. That's why we love genealogy, because we're keeping alive our ancestors, our families, our traditions, and therefore, ourselves. It is a great, great process. [APPLAUSE] I love Salt Lake City. I had a tour yesterday of the Family History Library. And as you'll hear, every time I come here, whether you're a religious person or not, what I'm about to say is true. Every time I come here and go to the Family History Library, a miracle happens, and I'm going to share that miracle, two of those miracles, with you this morning. But first I want to show you a short clip, a trailer, of something very dear to my heart. If you could please play the tape. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Roll camera. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Showtime.

Sheesh. - So, are you ready? - More than ready. - I've always wanted to do this.

- I'm a little nervous, to tell you the truth. - I'm so nervous. [LAUGHTER] - I'm already getting very nervous. I want you to know this. - Every family has family stories. Every family has myths. - I've got them all over the place, apparently. - [LAUGHS] I know, you do. - Wow. - It's hard to kind of piece together what is just a blatant lie and what's history. We think we have a memory, and then we go, did we even live in that house? Were we squatters? - I did not know that! - This is the book of life for Scarlett Ingrid Johansson. - [GRUNTS] - Not bad, huh? - [LAUGHS] - You're kidding. Oh, my-- [LAUGHS] - What the hell? - Yes. - [GASPS] Oh, my God. - [LAUGHS] Yeah, The Wonder Years. - Where in the hell did you get this picture? It makes me weepy.

- That is the record of your ancestor becoming free, as rare a document as you'll ever find on any black family tree. - I'll be damned. - As soon as one entered the Warsaw ghetto, one saw the tragic reality. - What do you think that must have been like for them to be loaded onto trains like cattle and not knowing where they were going?

- That's huge. Somebody like me, 300 years ago, making their way in the world. I hope they're not turning over in their grave. [LAUGHTER] - You come from a family with deep, deep roots in America. Your ancestor knew George Washington, for goodness' sake. - And George Washington really knew him. - [LAUGHS] - Chris, that's his mug shot. - He looks like a tough customer. - [LAUGHS] - Does this make my son also my uncle? - [LAUGHS] - Can you read the percent? - Yeah! I'm black. - [LAUGHTER] - I am black. - Welcome back. - Oh, you did it, you did it! I knew it. Unbelievable.

[LAUGHTER] - Oh, my God. - I'm feeling history in a way I never, ever, ever have even begun to think about. - This is your full family tree. - It's a little overwhelming. - How about that? That's so fantastic. - These are your people, Carly Simon. - My peeps! - I think I found out a little bit too much. [LAUGHTER] - So much has been hidden and stolen, so to have that given back to me today is a blessing. - This is the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen. - This is some show you got here. [END PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] Thank you. That was the trailer for Season 4. We're filming Season 5, which will air later this year. Now, I want to thank our lead sponsor, Ancestry.com. Give it up to Ancestry.com. [APPLAUSE] And our founding sponsor, Johnson & Johnson, and our newest sponsor, AT&T. Without them, there'd be no Finding Your Roots. So really, please, thanks.

[APPLAUSE] Most of you know I have a BA in History from Yale, class of 1973, and then I went to England to the University of Cambridge, where I got a PhD. My PhD's in English language, and literature, and I teach African and African-American studies at Harvard, where I've been for the last 26 years. So how did a guy with those credentials end up doing a TV show about genealogy and genetics? Well, that's the story that I want to share with you, to tell you how I got here, how I was brought to the table. It all started the day I met this lady. This is Jane Gates, and Jane Gates was a slave until 1865. Jane Gates is my great-great-grandmother. She was born in 1819. She died in 1888, so obviously, I didn't meet her literally. But this is the day that I first saw this photograph, and it was the day that we buried her grandson, who's my grandfather. Jane had two sons, Edward Gates and Henry Gates, and my brother's Paul Edward, and I'm, of course, Henry Louis. This is her son, my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother, on our farm in Patterson Creek, West Virginia, where my father was born. It's about halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington on the Potomac River in the Allegheny Mountains. That's a close-up of him. And he had a son. This is my grandfather. This is Edward St. Lawrence Gates, who was born in 1879, and he died in 1960, when I was nine years old. Edward had seven sons, and the seventh son was my daddy, Henry Louis Gates Sr. God rest his soul. Now the date of the funeral when we buried my grandfather was July 2, 1960. And I'll never forget it for a couple of reasons. One, my father took me by the hand. My grandfather was buried in Cumberland, Maryland. And my grandfather took me by the hand. I mean, my father took me by the hand to my grandfather's casket, and I'd never been that close to a corpse before. And so I was terrified, and you remember what that felt like when you were that close to a corpse for the first time. But I was astonished when I saw my grandfather, because of how white he looked. You know, go back and look at this baby picture. My grandfather did not look like a typical black person, right? My grandfather was so light-complected, we called him Casper behind his back. [LAUGHTER] So you could imagine if he looked that white with blood coursing through his veins, how white he looked dead.

He looked like he had been coated with alabaster and sprinkled with baby powder. So I'm standing there holding my father's hand, and I hear a noise from my father. Now, what I'm about to say is going to sound bizarre, but I thought my father was laughing. Why would I think my father was laughing? I thought he's laughing at how ridiculously white his father looked. My father was the funniest man on the face of the earth. My father made Redd Fox look like an undertaker. [LAUGHTER] I'll tell you how funny my father was. All my life, I wanted to go to Harvard and Yale, then I wanted to go to Oxford and Cambridge. This is how I was programmed. So as I said, I went to Yale, and I got this fellowship to go to Cambridge. It's a Mellon fellowship. And I was the first African-American--at that time, we said the first Afro-American--to get a Mellon fellowship. So I went back to Calhoun College at Yale, my dorm, and I called my parents, and I said, "Momma." Daddy answered the phone. I said, Daddy, put Momma on the extension phone. Remember in those days, you didn't have two phones? You had a phone and an extension phone. So Momma got on the extension phone. I said, "Momma and Daddy, you'll never believe it, you'll never believe it. I got a Mellon fellowship. I'm the first Afro-African to get a Mellon fellowship." And without missing a beat, my daddy said, "You're the first Negro to get a Mellon fellowship?" I said, "Yeah, Daddy." He said, "Huh, they're going to call it the Watermelon fellowship from now on." [LAUGHTER] That was my father.

So cut back to the Kight Funeral Home, Cumberland, Maryland, July 2, 1960. I'm standing there holding his hand, looking at his father's corpse. I hear this noise. I look up to share the joke, and my father wasn't laughing at all. He was crying. It was the first time I saw my father cry. And I was humiliated, ladies and gentlemen. I was mortified, because I stood there, I was busting out laughing at how my grandfather looked in his casket. But nobody noticed me, because everyone was astonished to see the funny man, my father, actually crying. So we buried my grandfather where all the Gateses are buried, in the Kight Funeral Home in Cumberland, Maryland. Then we came back to the Gates family home, which Jane Gates had purchased in cash in 1870, five years after being a slave. Think about that. [APPLAUSE] My father takes my brother--I have one brother, Dr. Paul Gates, who's the chief of dentistry at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. He's five years older. Daddy takes Rocky, his nickname, and me upstairs in his parents' home. I had never been upstairs in my parents' home. You know, back in the day, black people did not play that stuff. You couldn't sit on someone else's bed, you couldn't step on a grave. And for goodness' sake, you could not call one of your parents' friends by their first name. I have students who come up to me and say, "What am I supposed to call you?" And I say, "Well, young man, do not hesitate to call me Professor Gates. What are you supposed to call me?" I still refer to my deceased--my parents' deceased friends as Miss Mary and Mr. Ozzie. And one of the things that you did not do was go upstairs in your grandparents' bedroom. So you have to understand, they just disappeared at night. They went up magically. I didn't know where they went. So my brother and I are going up to see my grandparents' bedroom, and they had--my cousin, Johnny Gates, still owns this house--and they had a sunporch off the bedroom. And Daddy took Rocky and me onto that sunporch. And on the sunporch was an armoire, and he opened it up, and it was full of bank ledgers. My grandfather was a janitor at the First National Bank in Cumberland, Maryland, and he was stealing these bank ledgers. [LAUGHTER] And Daddy starts to pull these bank ledgers out. He's on the floor, surrounded by half a dozen bank ledgers, and he's furiously looking for something. And finally, six bank ledgers, seven bank ledgers, the seventh bank ledger, he found what he was looking for. And he said, "You boys, I want you to look at this." We looked over his shoulder, and you know what it was? It was an obituary. And it said, "Died this day in Cumberland, Maryland, January 6, 1888. A colored woman, Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman." And my brother and I looked at each other, and then he pulled this photograph from between the leaves of that bank ledger. And he said, "This is the oldest Gates. This is your great-great-grandmother. Her name was Jane. She was a midwife, and she was a slave till the end of the Civil War. I never want you to forget her name or the fact that she was a slave. We don't want her memory to die." And with that, he closed the bank ledger, put this photograph back in the volume, and put all the volumes in the armoire. Then we went downstairs for the repast. Then we drove home. That night, I went up to my bedroom. My father worked two jobs, ladies and gentlemen, for 37 years. He worked as a laborer in the paper mill in the daytime, and he was a janitor at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company in the evening. And so we always had a really nice house, and I always had my own bedroom. I always had my own bookcase, and I always had my own desk. And on the desk that sat by my bed rested one of those old red Webster's dictionaries. You remember those, right? The last thing I did before I went to sleep that night was to look up the word estimable, because I didn't know what it meant. And I thought, wow, if that lady is estimable, maybe I'm estimable, too. And the next day, we went to the mill picnic on July 3, 1960. And on the way back, I asked my dad to buy me a composition book. And that night, in front of our 12-inch RCA Victor television, I interviewed my mother and I interviewed my father about what only later I would learn is called one's family tree, or one's genealogy. I wanted to know how I was connected to this odd-looking lady who had been a slave and a midwife and how I could possibly be descended from a man who was so fair, so different in color than I am. And I was able to go back to my great-great grandmother on my father's side and my great-great-grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side. By the way, this is the last surviving copy of those bank ledgers. I own it, and I just took it to Harvard to have it restored. We thought all of them had been lost, but my cousin Johnny Gates found one and then gave it to me. It's the greatest gift I ever received in my whole life. [APPLAUSE] And these are the kind of clippings that my grandfather was keeping, just about current events. And he had a morbid fascination with death--airplane crashes, railroad crashes, people killed in automobile accidents, and also black history. There's an entry for the first black man who became the first federal judge in the United States, all kinds of famous events like that, and I was very moved. Cut to the year 1977. What's the greatest thing happening in the history of television? Roots. Well, you could say--and like all of you, everybody here watched Roots, right?

[APPLAUSE] Well, I watched Roots with mixed emotions. You could say, since 1977, I've had a severe case of Roots envy. I hated Alex Haley. Why? I wanted to be like Alex Haley. I wanted to trace my ancestors back to the slave ship that brought them from Africa and then reverse the Middle Passage and find out what tribe or ethnic group that I had come from. But only Alex Haley could do that. No one else could do that. And I met Alex Haley. Quincy Jones introduced me to Alex Haley once, and I was very polite. I didn't show my envy. [LAUGHTER] But I looked at him with so much admiration that he could do that. And how come I couldn't do that? And I always kept this interest. You know, I would lose that composition book, and then I'd interview my parents all over again. But I wanted to know about my family tree. In the year 2000, well, in the year 1992, and I talked about the miracles that had happened to me at the Family History Library. On May 11, 1992--and I went back and found this clip last week--I gave a lecture here in Salt Lake City for the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences. And that was on Friday, May 15. The next day, I woke up early because of jet lag, and I was about to fly back to Boston. And I was thinking, What can I do on a Saturday in Salt Lake City? [LAUGHS] The Family History Library. So I call the number, see if it was open. Opened at 9 o'clock, I got there about 9:05. It was packed, and I was astonished at the ethnic diversity of all the people who were there. They were at microfilm readers and microfiche readers. Remember those? You know, the young people here don't even know what they are. And I swear to goodness, when I walked in, I heard this eruption over in the corner. And a lady stood up and said, "I found my great-grandmother, I found my great-grandmother." And she burst into tears, and all the people got up, and went over, and hugged her. And I said, Man, this is like being at a black church.

[LAUGHTER] Like, whoa, man, there's something to this genealogy business. And I was deeply moved, just deeply moved. And I was sorry that I had to rush to the airport and fly back to Boston. But I never forgot that experience. Then in the year 2000, I got a letter from Dr. Rick Kittles from Washington, DC, at Howard University. And he said, "Dear Dr. Gates." It started out, "Have you ever seen Roots?" And I was saying, What kind of idiot is going to ask me, the chairman of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard, have I ever seen Roots? So I thought, This guy is an idiot. Wonder if I should keep reading this letter? And he said, "We can now do in a test tube what Alex Haley did after years and years of research. We can trace an African-American's ancestry on the mother's line using mitochondrial DNA back to Africa." And he was looking for volunteers. He was having a hard time finding African-American men to volunteer as the guinea pigs. I couldn't believe it. It was like a miracle. He had no idea that I had this nascent interest in genealogy. So I put the letter down. I called him in his lab. And I said, "Dr. Kittles, you don't know this, but I'm a genealogy junkie. I will fly you up to Cambridge if you drop everything. I'll pay you whatever I have to pay." And so he did. The next day, he came up. And he told me about the process, and I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, just do what you got to do." And he said, "Roll up your sleeve."

Now I should have known there was a reason that no other African-American male was dumb enough-- [LAUGHTER] --to volunteer in this first sample. Dr. Rick Kittles is many things. He's a brilliant geneticist. He is not a brilliant extractor of blood. [LAUGHTER] For those you in the front row, you see those veins? I have fabulous veins. I've had a couple hip replacements, and that thing just, boop. Everybody finds my veins, everybody accesses my blood easily, but Dr. Rick Kittles. After 45 minutes of this brother poking around my arm, I looked at him and said, "I do not want to know where I'm from in Africa that bad." [LAUGHTER] Finally, he struck gold, and he filled up these vials with blood. Now, students don't even believe this. Remember, this is the year 2000. You know what he did? He just packed my blood in a cooler with dry ice and went to the airport and climbed on the plane. This is before 9/11. And six weeks come and go, nothing. Six months. Finally, you know, he's not calling me. He's not returning my calls. So finally, a friend of mine said, "Call him from a different number."

So I called him from a different number, and he answered the phone right away. He said, "Rick Kittles." I go, "Rick, it's Skip Gates." He goes, "Oh, man, I was just about to call you." [LAUGHTER] I said, "Yeah, man, tell me, where am I from?" He said, "Well, your results are so anomalous, we had to run them over and over again." And I said, "Yeah, where am I from?" He said, "Well, on your mother's line, you are descended from the Nubian people." Now, all black people, ladies and gentlemen, want to be Nubians, because the Nubians, they were the black kings of the Nile. They defeated the Egyptians. The Nubians were Egypt's mortal enemy. Nubia runs from Khartoum to Wadi Halfa to the Second Cataract. And the 25th dynasty of Egypt was a black dynasty, the Nubian dynasty. So all African-Americans want to be descended from the black pharaohs. Or else, like Oprah, they want to be descended from the Zulus, because the Zulus were ferocious warriors. [LAUGHS] There's only one problem, that no black people are descended from the Zulus or the Nubians, because no Zulus or Nubians came to the United States in the slave trade. But I didn't care. Rick Kittles said that I was descended from the Nubians. He sent me a letter of certificate of Nubianology-- [LAUGHTER] --which I have framed still to this day, and that was good enough for me. Well, a couple of weeks later, I went to the bathroom. And it's very difficult for me to talk about this moment. I was standing in the bathroom in the middle of the night, and really, it was a gift from God. Something, it didn't speak to me, but it occurred to me that I could combine these two interests that I had had, one since I was nine years old the day we buried my grandfather, this interest in genealogy, with this new science of ancestry tracing through genetics. And I could combine them. I'd get eight prominent African-Americans, and I would do their family trees back to slavery, when the paper trail inevitably ends. And when it ended, then I would do their--analyze their DNA and see where they were from in Africa. And I stood there with tears running down my face. It was just one of the greatest moments of my life. And the next day, I called Quincy Jones, who had become a very good friend. Now, Quincy is a jazz musician. He's up all night, so you can't do business with Quincy until about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I waited till 3 o'clock. I called him, and I said, "Q, what if I could do for you what Alex Haley did for himself? Would you be in a TV series if I could raise the money?" And he said, "Does it hurt?" [LAUGHTER] And I responded like you would. I said, "Absolutely not, Quincy, absolutely not." Now, I wanted Quincy Jones because he's Quincy Jones, but I also wanted him because of his best friend. Does anybody know who Quincy Jones's best friend is? Oprah Winfrey. And why did I want Oprah Winfrey? Because I needed $6 million. [LAUGHTER] So I waited about a minute. I was watching my--looking at my watch. And I said, "Q, would you ask Oprah if she'd be in this show?" And he said, "No." But he said, "I'm going to do you one better. I'm going to give you her secret name and address, and you write to her a snail mail letter and ask her to be in the show." And I hung up, and I thought, wow, I've gotten the brushoff in many ways, but that's cold, man. All Quincy had to do is just ask her. But he didn't. So I forgot it until the next day. I got up and I said, what the heck, and I wrote to Oprah Winfrey. Six months come and go, I hear nothing. It's a Sunday afternoon. I'm watching NFL football, and my cell phone rings. I look at my cell phone. Quincy's calling. I said, "Q, what's up?" And a deep woman's voice said, "Dr. Gates, this is Oprah Winfrey." I said, "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus." [LAUGHTER] I knew the answer was positive. Why? Because rich people don't call you with bad news, ladies and gentlemen. [LAUGHTER] I walked in to do our first sponsor pitch at Johnson & Johnson. We didn't even know--no one had done a show like this before, and we didn't even know if it would work. And I walked in, and my whole pitch was, How would you like your product associated with the world knowing what tribe Oprah Winfrey is from in Africa? You know what that was like? If you look up at the ceiling, and you see those lights. Imagine the ceiling parts and a giant ATM machine just slowly came down. [LAUGHTER] And the result was African-American Lives. We got Whoopi Goldberg, my classmate Dr. Ben Carson, Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, Quincy, Oprah, Chris Tucker, Bishop TD Jakes. And it was a huge hit. 8 million people watched African American Lives. [APPLAUSE] So PBS asked us to do a sequel, and we had Morgan Freeman--anybody who plays the president and God, you've got to do his family tree--Tina Turner--I had a thing about Tina Turner, I asked her if I could do her DNA myself, but she said no, so that was a lost opportunity--Chris Rock. And then I got a letter from a lady who identified herself as being of Russian Jewish ancestry. She said, "Dear Dr. Gates, I have always admired your career, your stance on cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, but after watching African-American Lives, I've decided you're a big fat racist, because you don't do white people. You don't do Jewish people like me. Why don't you do Jewish people like me?" And so I called our representative at Coca-Cola, which by this time had become a second sponsor. And--I got--it was an African-American lady. And I got--I said, "Ingrid, I'm holding a letter from a lady that says I'm a racist." She goes, "What?" I said, "Because we only do black people." I said, "What do you think? Do you think we could expand the brand? Could we do white people and whatever?" And you know, ladies and gentlemen, she didn't answer. I thought the call had dropped. And only later I realized that she had been in the meeting with other executives at Coca-Cola. She got up and walked down the corridor, because she didn't want any of them to hear. So I said, "Ingrid, Ingrid, Ingrid?" And I was about to hang up. And then in a little tiny voice, she said, "Skip." I go, "Ingrid, you're there." She said, "Yes." She said, "Skip, there's only one thing I want to say." I said, "What?" She said, "There are a lot more white people drinking Coke than black people." [LAUGHTER] I took that as a yes. Then we had the problem, you know, white people come in kinds. There's Catholics, and Jewish people, people from Russia, Germany. Then we had to do Asians. There are different kind of Asians, Muslims, Indians. How do you pick among all these different kinds of people? Well, I did what Noah would do. I picked two Jews, two Catholics, two Asians. [LAUGHTER] And the result was Faces of America, and then we expanded it. PBS asked us to do a weekly show, and with the support of Ancestry, now it became Finding Your Roots-- [APPLAUSE] --the number-one show on PBS.

In conclusion, people ask me, "Why do you do this show? Why do you do this show?" Oh, I want to show you something else first. Now, remember I said that obituary that I saw that day in my grandparents' house? When I started doing research for what became Finding Your Roots, nobody could find that obituary. There are two obituaries of Jane Gates, but both are straightforward, and neither of them mentioned that she was an estimable colored woman. But I know that I saw that. I know that I saw it, because that's the night I learned what the word estimable meant. And then I thought, well, maybe in my grandfather's scrapbook there was another document. So last weekend, I went bone fishing in the Bahamas with some good friends of mine. And I love to fish. I grew up on the Potomac, as I said. This is very hard for me to get through. I told you that miracles happen to me in relationship to genealogy and the Family History Library. So Sunday afternoon, I emailed from this plane our director of research. And I said, "Just one more time, could you look at the databases and send me all of the obituaries that you can find about Jane Gates?" And I got an answer, boop, right away. So I'm tooling up the coast with six other men who had been fishing with me, just, really, a week ago this Sunday. And I opened it up. And ladies and gentleman, I thought I was hallucinating, and then I had to fight back the tears. This is a newspaper called The Sunday Civilian, dated January 8, 1888. And you can't read it, but in the encircled part, right there, it says, "Aunt Jane Gates, well-known and estimable colored woman." Newspaper.com. Newspaper.com, we found it after all these years last Sunday. [APPLAUSE] I was not making it up. I remembered it from nine years old. Don't give up on your research. Things are being digitized all the time. You might miss it the first time around. It might not have entered the database the last time that you looked. You got to keep hope. As Jesse says, you got to keep hope alive. But there it is, the thing that I remembered when I was 9 years old. So that's my miracle to share with you today. So people ask me, people say, "Why do you do this?" You know why I do it? I do it to show that, one, we're a nation of immigrants. I do it to show that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin at the level of the genome. [APPLAUSE] From time immemorial, there is no such thing as racial purity. We do everybody's DNA, everybody's mixed up. No matter what the law was in the day, when the lights came down, everybody was sleeping with everybody else. [APPLAUSE] And we have to stand against people who would use our apparent racial differences to divide us, ladies and gentlemen. That is un-American. That's not what our country is all about. [APPLAUSE] And the best evidence of our unity is DNA. DNA, everybody's got to have their DNA analyzed. [APPLAUSE] Final thing, and then I'll stop.

I'm a proud African-American. I was born in 1950. When I was growing up, the blackest thing you could be was an educated man or an educated woman, not an entertainer or an athlete. Now, don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love athletics. But ladies and gentlemen, there are far more black board-certified cardiologists than there are all the black men in the NBA. But far too few of our own people understand that. So my colleagues and I want to develop a curriculum that will go to middle-school kids, and it will teach them--in the social studies class--every child will have to do their family tree. [APPLAUSE] Every child will have to do their family tree. Then we'll go down the hall to the science class. All the kids will spit in a test tube, ship the results out here to Ancestry. And while they wait, we'll teach them how the science works. We want to use the magic of ancestry tracing through genealogy and genetics to reignite the love of learning for poor black and brown kids, the way it was when I was growing up. [APPLAUSE] The causes of poverty are both structural and behavioral, and too many of our own people have lost their way. And we think that with this curriculum, it will allow them to be born again, to bring that fire for learning, that passion for learning, back. Why? Because what is ancestry tracing about? It's about your favorite subject. What's your favorite subject? You, yourself, it is about learning about yourself. What kind of person is not going to be fired up by this curriculum? And we believe if we get school systems to introduce it, we'll be able to take our people, not back to the future, ladies and gentlemen, but black to the future. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE] Thank you.

Now, we have a little surprise. With another colleague, I got almost $1 million, and we tried this experiment. It's not just a theory. We had two summers of summer camp bringing kids from all over the country, middle-school kids, and we made a film for RootsTech. We are debuting our results right now. Can you play the video? Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to see it. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - 13 kids, ages 10 to 13, from different parts of the US and Canada, each with different stories and families with origins the world over, came together for a genetics and genealogy camp to research the question-- - You can see your DNA very clearly. - --who am I? Who were my ancestors? Where did they come from? How are we different? How much do we share, and how far back can we go? - My dad's great-great-great-grandfather. - They're digging into their family trees and finding their roots.

[MUSIC PLAYING] - I always wondered where I came from and why am I here. - I was really excited to start it, because I really wanted to learn about myself. - It sounded really cool, so I sent in my form to try to be part of the camp.

[APPLAUSE] - I thought that would be a good experience for me, because I love science, and I want to study about DNA. - We're going to give you the tools to explore, the tools to explore other organisms, the tools to think about your near and distant ancestry. And the beautiful thing about this approach is that you are in the driver's seat. All you campers are doing the work of scientists. You are scientists this week. - And I'm hoping that I learn a lot here. - Welcome to Finding Your Roots. - One of the most fundamental questions we all ask ourselves is kind of, who am I, and who are we? It's as natural a question as human beings have asked ourselves since the beginning of time. - I have to search all this stuff up. - We're asking curious kids to ask questions about their own origin, about their own place in their family's genealogy, and their own place in human evolution. Basically, where do they fit in the universe of humanity? - The Finding Your Roots camps were the brainchild of Harvard professor and Finding Your Roots series host Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Penn State anthropology professor Nina Jablonski. - I knew it was a good idea. It's one thing to think you have a good idea, but this is a great idea. And no child will be left behind if we have them trace their family tree. Why? Because what's your favorite subject? Your favorite subject is yourself. Both genetics and genealogy are about your ancestry. They both offer you a window onto the past. One, the recent past, genealogy, because you can only pursue the paper trail as long as there is paper in the trail. [LAUGHS] And then, when the paper trail disappears, we look into the distant past through genetics. - So by starting with genealogy and going back one generation at a time, and then getting kids to imagine, what would it be like 16 or 64 generations back, or a thousand generations back, then we are in the realm of their genetics and human evolution. They can see the continuity from themselves to their distant ancestors. - Some camps, they call us children or campers, but here, they called us scientists. - What's the reason why I refer to you as scientists in this camp, and not campers, or kids, or students? - We get to try to be scientists. - Whoo, absolutely, so we get to be in the lab, and you actually get to, not try, actually be scientists, right? - We spent a lot of time getting the kids to identify as scientists right from the beginning. When they realized that they could do it just as well as the adult scientists, they became empowered and excited. - Daniel Mann, he-- - Using a research-based curriculum, young scientists build knowledge and research skills over the course of the camp. - Oh, that's so cool. - That's the DNA condensing. - Experiments and games teach lessons about mutation, adaptation, natural selection, classification-- - No, these are bigger. - --evolution, differences, and relatedness. - You can show me why you think this part's longer. - What do you think you are? - Campers will make predictions for what they think their ancestry will be. - All of my family traveled over from Europe at one time. - Well, I think I'm East Asian, because I only have information about that, since I'm adopted. That's what I think, yeah. - And they will open the results of their individual DNA tests conducted weeks before at the same time together. - I'm 100 percent European. - Whoa. - 2 percent Korean. - From the big picture of genetics to the very personal of genealogy, campers learn to use all their resources, starting with their own family-- - The first thing that all genealogists want to find is what we call a vital record. - --navigating the paper trail in a digital world online and going beyond the limitations of the internet by seeking out sources in the real world. - Hi. - Hi. - Hi. - --once she was in the Homers' home. - This is you, and then-- - After that, I guess about the middle '30s. - All the while, each developing his or her own personal project to unveil on the final day, when the doors open and they present their findings to their families. - Discovering a new aspect about oneself through one's ancestors is infectious. Genealogy puts you there. And all of a sudden, the abstractions of American history, the endless names and dates and timelines, all of a sudden, they have a face and a texture. And the face, somehow, resembles you. History becomes a mirror, and you can see yourself in it. That's hard to beat. [END PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] Thank you, and from this experiment, now we're going to school boards to get the curriculum, trying to get it institutionalized in the school system. I need your help for that. I need your help, whoever you are, because we can make a change in this society through this curriculum. You know the final word, now it's my pleasure just to give it up for two people. Finding Your Roots has amazing results, but only because we have an amazing team. And that team is headed by someone right here in Utah. Provo. Her center's in Provo. And we've been working together since I had the idea for African-American Lives, which has morphed into Face of America, and now into Finding Your Roots. And that is my dear friend, Johni Cerny, who's right here in the front row. Give it up for our chief genealogist, ladies and gentlemen, Johni Cerny. [APPLAUSE] And finally, because of the revolution in genetic analysis, when we started in 2005, admixture analysis didn't even exist in a commercial way. The Broad Institute at Harvard taught me about autosomal DNA and what we now commonly call admixture and do for $99. It didn't even exist at that time. And then I was at a convention, and I heard a genetic genealogist speak. And I realized, first of all, that she, like Johni Cerny, was a brilliant master of her endeavor, her enterprise. And secondly, that we could begin to produce new results if we could bring together genealogy and genetics, particularly for people who were adopted, particularly for people who would encounter surprising, what they call, non-paternity events in their family tree, which are very, very emotional moments. Someone mentioned to me yesterday at the Family History Library that all week long, his mother-in-law was asking him about the Téa Leoni story. Many of you saw that amazing story. Téa Leoni came to us, knew that her mother was adopted, and wanted us to find the biological mother and father. And CeCe Moore found the biological mother, the biological father. Then found out that the biological mother was still alive, 96 years old, and we arranged a reunion. That's amazing, ladies and gentlemen. It's amazing. [APPLAUSE] And all that work is led by one person, the most brilliant genetic genealogist in the world, as far as I'm concerned. Give it up for CeCe Moore. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you. - Thank you. - You all right? - Thank you so much.

When I first met Dr. Gates in 2013, he offered me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become the first full-time genetic genealogist, DNA expert, working on a television series. This was very fitting, since Dr. Gates's work was groundbreaking in this field, and he was the first to bring genetic genealogy to broad public audiences through his television series African-American Lives starting in 2006. And later, in February 2010, I remember being amazed watching his series Faces of America, when he demonstrated the power of autosomal DNA cousin matching to reveal connections that the paper trail could not. This was truly cutting edge, especially since the series was actually filmed in 2009 before any of the commercial companies were even offering this service. So I was, of course, honored and thrilled to be invited to work with this true pioneer, Dr. Gates. When I first started working with the series, the formula was that the guest was presented with the paper trail research until that ran out. And then we would turn to the DNA to see what that could uncover. From the beginning, my goal was to integrate the DNA research with the paper trail research and into the body of the stories we were telling our guests and the audience. Fortunately, I work with the best boss and team in the media business at Roots, and they embraced my DNA work fully. We started making great strides in this area in Season 3 with the LL Cool J story. If you've seen the show, you know that through DNA, we uncovered the decades-old secret that his mother was adopted. DNA research was responsible for that entire storyline. You also may remember that through DNA we were able to identify both of LL Cool J's maternal biological grandparents. What you didn't see on the show is that his biological maternal grandmother is still alive, and this research enabled a beautiful family reunion. His mother has built and continued to enjoy an extremely close relationship with the mother she never even knew that she was missing. Then in last season, we were able to do something similar for Téa Leoni and her mother. In this case, the adoption was not secret, but the identities of the birth parents were. Again, through DNA, we were able to identify both biological birth parents and reunite a family. To our great surprise and joy, her birth mother was also still living, and we don't expect to find that for adoptees born in the 1940s. And they have also been able to meet and build a relationship with the biological family, and none of this could have been accomplished without DNA research. But this type of research is not just for adoptees. In this next season that we're working on now, we have been very successful in more fully integrating the documentary research with the DNA research more than ever before, making meaningful discoveries for many of our guests, including a very significant historical connection for one of our African-American guests. And I wish I could tell you what it was, but I'm sworn to secrecy. I can't wait to share it all with you next fall. And this fits well with the theme of RootsTech this year, Connect. Belong. By reconnecting lost family branches through DNA, we can find new ancestors, new cousins, new research connections, new stories, and a greater sense of belonging. There is no more powerful tool than DNA testing to reach these goals. You may be thinking, Well, sure, for the experts, but how can I accomplish this? Let me tell you, DNA research is for everyone. You all carry this unique record within you. You all have genealogical brick walls just waiting to be demolished by this record. In the course of my work, every day I see amazing discoveries and answers to decades-old research questions that are just waiting to be found by the family researchers. This record, this potential you have inside you, can be unlocked. The databases are exploding, and that means we have much more DNA. More DNA leads to more answers. The DNA companies are advancing and offering new tools that are making it easier for all of us. Educational offerings are improving and expanding, as you've seen this week here at RootsTech. Hasn't it been incredible, all the DNA classes? [APPLAUSE] And there's tremendous daily support on social media for those who want to learn to access and unlock the power of this record, their very own DNA. I said it last year. The potential is enormous for discovery. But just in this short year since I last stood here on this stage, I can tell you that huge strides have been made, both in data collection and in the resources available to you. So please, if you haven't yet, join me in this incredible genetic genealogy revolution and discover the stories that your DNA is just waiting to reveal. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]