"How are you?" "Good." "It didn't end like I expected it." "I didn't know what was gonna happen." "I never know." "Are you gonna have that tattooed?" "I am." "Stephen King is one of America's most revered storytellers." "Thank you." "Thank you very much." "He's published over 50 novels, which have sold more than 350 million copies, not to mention inspiring some of Hollywood's most horrifying films." "Here's Johnny!" "Nobody comes up with stories like yours, Stephen." "Where do you think those dark stories come from, my man?" "What happened to you to make this thing happen?" "Well, Dr. Gates, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you." "Listen." "I grew up interested in nightmares, scary stories, things that go bump in the night, and my mother used to read "Fate" magazine, which was about the paranormal and flying saucers and all that stuff," "and she would read the stories to me, and I was fascinated." "One detail from Stephen's childhood growing up in rural Maine has remained as unsettling to him as an unresolved plotline from one of his novels." "When he was just two years old, his father left the house and never returned." "According to my mother..." "I can only tell you family legend, that he said he was going out for cigarettes and never came back." "So it must have been a hard pack to find." "Yeah." "I'm sorry." "But, you know, you get used to it." "Mm-hmm." "And Mom was great." "We didn't have a lot of money, but there was always enough." "So we were pretty happy." "When asked, where do you say your people come from?" "Heh!" "Well, I used to say they were Scotch-Irish because that's what my mother said, but now I just say I'm from Maine." "My mother's from Maine." "I was born in Portland, Maine." "I grew up here." "This is where I am." "So..." "In other words," "I have a short leash." "When people talk about your past, where do you come from?" "I come from here." "I mean, have you wanted to know more?" "I've always been curious about what my past was, but my mother had a saying:" ""Peek not at a knothole lest ye be vexed"..." "Hmm." "By which she meant, you know, if you look too closely, you might see something you don't like." "So I'm curious, and at the same time," "I've always been a little bit... a little bit of trepidation about that, too." "Actress Gloria Reuben is most often recognized for her pioneering role as Jeanie Boulet, a physician's assistant struggling with HIV, in the primetime television phenomenon "ER."" "More recently, she appeared in Steven Spielberg's epic film." ""Lincoln," playing Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln." "Gloria grew up in Canada in the 1970s in a mixed-race family." "As a young woman trying to break into theater and film, she was often forced to confront questions about her identity." "Oh..." "You look stunning, absolutely beautiful." "What is going on?" "Miss Black Ontario." "Let me tell you, there were some people who thought I wasn't black enough." "Really?" "Because I was mixed race." "From black people or white people?" "From both." "From both?" "Yeah, absolutely." "Did you experience any racism?" "Yes." "I remember specifically walking to school one day and being spit on by two boys..." "Really?" "And called the n-word." "I was 7." "Oh, my God." "I remember that vividly." "I was confused and hurt, and I just didn't talk about it." "Further complicating Gloria's understanding of her origins was the death of her father." "Cyril George Reuben, 73 years old when Gloria was born, died when she was very young, leaving her without any clues to his family's past or even the origins of the Reuben family name." "You said that your mom didn't even know Cyril's parents' names." "Now, I find that completely..." "I know." "Unfathomable." "Why do you think that's true?" "Well, I..." "I don't know why that's true." "Maybe he didn't want to talk about it." "You know, maybe it just wasn't important to my mother." "Mm-hmm." "I don't understand." "Then you really start wondering, OK." "That's when the question of," ""OK, well, where do I belong?"" "Mm-hmm." "Where do I fit?" "Even though in my head, I know obviously I come from somewhere, in my heart, it's always been a lonely kind of feeling." "Tony-award-winning actor Courtney Vance has displayed remarkable versatility throughout his career, whether on Broadway alongside iconic actors like James Earl Jones and Tom Hanks, or as assistant district attorney Ron Carver on the hit TV show "Law Criminal Intent."" "Today Courtney and his wife, fellow actor Angela Bassett, live in Los Angeles, where they're raising their two young children." "Despite growing up in a close-knit family in Detroit," "Courtney knows virtually nothing about his own father's past." "My father, he was a foster child and never wanted to talk about it." "Mm-hmm." "So even my mother... my mother doesn't know anything about him." "Mm-hmm." "And that's why I think our family was just... our family unit was so close, because we knew that we were all we had." "Courtney's understanding of his family origins is clouded by his father's personal struggles, struggles that eventually led to his tragic suicide when Courtney was 30." "I got the call from my mother, and just utter shock." "And we didn't know the extent of the depression, and I think my mother knew, but I didn't know." "Uh-huh." "You must have been in shock." "He was..." "He asked me shortly before he died who were my heroes, and I said, "You are, Dad."" "I want to know everything about my dad and the Vance side of the family." "Stephen, Courtney, and Gloria were hoping to understand who their fathers were, and we wanted to try to help them solve that mystery, finally introducing them to ancestors on their father's side of their family trees." "They're good kids, and two of them are publishing novelists..." "To start, I visited Stephen King at his winter home in Florida." "Stephen told me he had no memories of his father, who abandoned his family when he was only two." "Now, you know who that is." "Not right offhand." "Is that my dad?" "This is a photo of your father." "Now, I've never seen this picture before." "That is Donald Edwin King." "Wow!" "How old was he when this was taken?" "Well, we found it in his naval records." "No kidding?" "He looks like me, a little bit." "Yeah." "No kidding." "I can remember as a kid thinking to myself," ""Well, if I ever meet my dad," ""I'm gonna sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother,"" "and as I got older, I would think," ""Well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I'll sock him in the mouth."" "Right." "Ha ha ha!" "That's called maturity." "Yeah." "Your mom never talked about him?" "I don't think she did." "She was very close-mouthed about Don." "In fact, we traveled around a lot, and she said, "People are gonna ask you what your father does."" "Say that he's in the Navy and that he's at sea,"" "because, she said, "that might not be a lie."" "Stephen's father's disappearance was not the only factor complicating our search." "There was also the issue that King turned out not to be his father's real last name." "According to Stephen's grandmother, and confirmed by his birth certificate, his original surname was Pollock." "Did your mother or grandmother ever tell you why your father changed his name?" "No." "There's very little that I know about any of these people because there's a pretty clean snip when my father leaves, and as I say, my mother kept her mouth shut about a lot of this stuff." "Well, we searched every archive that we could, but we found no official name change recorded." "Your father went by the name of Donald Pollock when he was 16 years old, but by the time he was 23, the next record we found, he was Donald King." "So the origin of the surname King remains a mystery." "Hmm." "Have you ever thought about the... that famous American author of 50 novels Stephen Pollock?" "Ha ha ha!" "No." "Ha ha ha!" "Doesn't have the same ring to it." "Even though we couldn't find out why Donald chose to call himself King, we now had a crucial clue." "With the Pollock surname in hand, we could begin to search for Stephen's father's roots." "First, we looked for details about Stephen's father's parents, William and Helen Pollock." "We discovered their marriage license, which showed that the newlyweds were living in Peru, Indiana, in 1917." "World War I was raging, and young men were being conscripted into the military." "A year later, a catastrophic flu pandemic wreaked havoc across the country." "By 1920, William and Helen had given birth to Stephen's father," "Donald, and we soon discover that Donald had already suffered a tragic loss." "Now, Stephen, this is the 1920 census record from Peru, Indiana." "Can you please read the transcribed section?" ""Helen, 23 years old, widow."" "When Helen was 23, your grandmother became a widow." "That means by the age of 6, your father had lost his father, too." "Just like me." "Just like you." "Wow." "Would you please turn the page?" ""William E. Pollock," ""a well-known engineer on the Lake Erie," ""died last evening about 7:00 at his home after an illness for pneumonia."" "He died in that massive influenza pandemic of 1918." "It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history." "It was known as the Spanish Flu." "It could almost be out of a horror novel, like one I wrote called "The Stand,"" "where the world's population is killed by a flu strain." "Hmm." "My grandfather died of Spanish Flu." "That's amazing." "William Pollock was 30 years old." "That was my grandfather." "Wow." "Moving up the Pollock line, we were able to trace." "Stephen's lineage all the way back to his fourth great grandfather, James Pollock, a Methodist minister in Pennsylvania." "We learned that James left Ireland for the United States immediately following the American Revolution." "He'd been raised in a family that survived the 1741 frost, a time so brutal it earned the nickname." ""Year of the Slaughter."" "The frost decimated the Irish people, killing their food supply and leading to mass starvation." "Eventually, one fifth of the Irish population perished in the famine." "It's not difficult to imagine why James Pollock left." "This is a chart showing your father's father's family," "Stephen... the Pollocks." "Wow." "What's it like to see all those generations restored to you?" "Makes them real." "Mmm." "It makes them real." "You see that there's a real foundation underneath you." "Did you know that you had paternal ancestors from Ireland?" "I never knew, but I always thought to myself," ""You look like an Irishman, you know, and you've got the Irish imagination."" "I don't know how much of that is true, and you've done this more than I have, so that you probably have a better guess, but I've always had that appreciation for fairies and ogres and boggarts" "and things of that nature." "So that sheds a lot of light." "Good." "But here's the thing that I bet you also know, is that the information always leads to more questions, where you say to yourself," ""Yes, but I want to know."" "Much like Stephen King," "Gloria Reuben was also starting her search for her father from scratch." "Gloria knowsothing about her father's past." "It was buried with him after his death when she was only 12." "Cyril George Reuben, a white man, was born in Jamaica in 1890." "Gloria was part of Cyril's second family." "He was 73 years old when she was born." "Gloria has long been curious about the origins of the Reuben name and whether or not it meant she had Jewish ancestors." "I believe that, from what my mother said," "Reuben being my last name," "I know sometimes Reuben is more often spelled." ""R-u-b-i-n" or "R-u-b-e-n" for the Jewish..." "But Reuben sandwich is "R-e-u."" "Exactly." "There's the Reuben sandwich." "So your mother told you you were part Jewish, that your father was Jewish?" "Yes." "Mm-hmm." "Did she know for sure..." "No." "You think you are?" "I...yes." "Are you a Jewish wanna-be?" "A wanna-be Jew?" "That's funny." "I've never..." "I've never thought of that before in that kind of context, but..." "Ha ha ha!" "No, I guess, you know, I have to... you know, I want to believe that because that's what I've been told." "Gloria's father's past was a blank slate." "He left behind almost no paper trail." "No one even knew the names of his parents." "Piecing together his family tree was going to be one of the most difficult assignments we'd ever had." "We started with the e clue that Gloria was able to give us." "Her father, Cyril George Reuben, had been married prior to his marriage to Gloria's mother, back in Jamaica." "Well, Gloria, this is an article that was published in A Jamaican newspaper... very famous... called "The Daily Gleaner" in 1945, and it's about your father." "And that's him there, when he was 55 years old and he was visiting Jamaica with his first wife, named Muriel." "Did your father ever talk to you about Jamaica, his life there?" "No." "I don't think I've ever seen a photo of him at that age." "Through this article, we discovered that Gloria's father Cyril had a brother named Percival Nathan." "We dug into Percival's records and found that he'd listed his mother as a woman named Florence Gabay." "By digging more deeply, we were able to make the connection between Florence Gabay and Gloria." "Now, Gloria, this is the birth certificate for a child born to Florence Gabay in 1890." "Cyril." "My father." "So you've just met your grandmother." "Florence Gabay." "Wow!" "Whoa." "But look at that birth certificate again." "He's listed with no surname." "He's just listed as Cyril." "Right." "Because there's no father listed on the birth certificate, it reinforces what we suspected." "Your dad Cyril and his brother Percival were most likely half-siblings." "They shared a mother but not necessarily the same father." "My God, it's crazy." "We found out that Cyril's mother," "Florence Gabay, led a very difficult life and may have had at least two more children out of wedlock." "The records further reveal that she also met a tragic end." "We discovered a death certificate from 1917 which listed her with no known family, dying alone at the age of 47 in a sanatorium in Jamaica." "This sad information was the last record we found for Florence Gabay's life." "I decided to go back to Jamaica to track down the lost identity of Cyril's father and trace the origins of that Reuben family name." "Buried in the colonial archives, we unearthed Cyril's first marriage certificate, which listed his father's name as Henry Emanuel Reuben." "That breakthrough led us to birth records for Henry's 4 siblings, all of them children of a man named Isaac Reuben," "Gloria's great grandfather." "And with the discovery of these long-lost relatives, we were able to resolve the mystery that always troubled" "Gloria about her Reuben heritage." "Have a look at this." "Gloria, those are all records of your Reuben ancestors' births, and what's interesting is where we found this list." "The English and German Synagogue?" "Shut up!" "Heh heh heh!" ""The English and German Synagogue, Kingston, Jamaica."" "Your father's family was Jewish." "See?" "I knew it!" "Ha ha ha!" "How's it make you feel?" "Amazing." "See?" "I didn't even know there was..." "Yeah, you don't think of Jamaican Jews, do you?" "Seriously." "Though less well known, the history of Jewish people in Jamaica is very old." "The story actually begins in 1492, when Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ordered all Spanish subjects to affirm their belief in the Roman Catholic church." "Spain's Jewish population was conversion, expulsion, or execution." "Many fled to the New World Spanish outpost of Santiago, known today as Jamaica." "But even those who fled to Jamaica continued to face discrimination." "This small group of Jews, including Gloria's ancestors, clung to their religion until finally they secured their political rights early in the 19th century." "Your great grandparents were part of a remarkable generation that won a victory, a major victory, over Jamaican anti-Semitism." "On December 19, 1831, just months before your great grandparents' wedding, the Jewish people in Jamaica were finally granted full rights under the law." "Wow!" "Now, we wanted to trace your father's family back further in time, but unfortunately, the paper trail run out." "That's the best that we could do." "It's great." "But already your family tree goes back 200 years... 209 years." "Are you gonna go to synagogue?" "I..." "Ha ha ha!" "I think just one thing at a time." "Ha ha ha!" "Too late to have a bat mitzvah?" "Like our other two guests, Courtney Vance knew next to nothing about his paternal ancestors." "Courtney knew that his father grew up as a foster child." "After his tragic death, many questions about his father's birth family haunted Courtney." "Now, with a family of his own," "Courtney longs for a connection to his father's past and perhaps some insight into his own identity." "Now, there you are as a young boy with your father, Conroy Vance." "Conroy was born on February 6, 1933, in Chicago." "Do you remember when this photograph was taken?" "Yes, at his foster father's house..." "John B. Cooper." "I don't know what he was showing me, but Dad always got something going, and I was always, "Well, how does it work, Daddy?"" "So we were... we were in rhythm right there." "Did your father ever talk about his biological parents?" "No." "No, I know nothing." "Could you please turn the page?" "Mm-hmm." "Now, Courtney, this is your father's birth certificate." "Have you ever seen that?" "Mm-mmm." "Can you find the name of his biological mother?" "That's his mother?" "Ardella?" "That's your grandmother, your biological grandmother." "Wow." "Her name is Ardella." "Ardella Vance." "She was 17?" "She was 17 years old." "Can you see what it says for his father?" "Nothing." "So that means your father was born out of wedlock." "Right." "She was 17, she was unmarried..." "Mmm." "And that's perhaps why she gave him up for adoption." "Mmm." "Ardella." "Ardella Vance." "That's a pretty name." "We wanted to know more about Ardella." "So we turned to our most basic starting point, the United States federal census." "We were puzzled that there was no trace of Ardella in the census records." "So we gave the local newspapers a try, and here we discovered a very unusual story." "Now, Courtney, this article was published in the famous "Chicago Defender"" "on October 1, 1932, 4 months before your father's birth." ""17-year-old schoolgirl Miss Ardella Vance..."" "Mm-hmm." ""Accused a minister of being responsible" ""for her delicate condition." "Reverend Richard W. Warren."" "Have you ever heard this story, Courtney?" "No." "Ardella sang in the choir of the Reverend Richard Warren's church on the South Side of Chicago." "And, Courtney, it was quite a scandal." "Reverend Warren was a very prominent member of the Chicago community." "He was 50, and he was married." "And your grandmother testified that he brought her to an apartment several times and had sex with her." "What happened?" "Well, let's see what happened in the case." "This ran two months after your father was born." ""Pastor Freed on Paternity Charges."" ""A scientific impossibility for a man" ""to be the father of an 11-month baby freed the Reverend Richard Warren."" "The reverend didn't deny that he had had sex with your grandmother, a teenage girl, but he wasn't on trial for that." "He was facing paternity charges." "So the court ruled that he wasn't father of her child because, you see, the dates didn't line up." "You do the math, like it says, that would have meant an 11-month pregnancy." "So he got off scot free because of the timing." "This is very painful." "I know it is, and I'm sorry." "So he was saying it was somebody else." "He was saying it was somebody else." "Even though we couldn't establish who Courtney's grandfather was, we were able to learn much more about his biological grandmother, Ardella." "We told Courtney how Ardella's paper trail led us back to Arkansas, to a family of poor struggling farmers." "Ardella had lost her own mother before she was two years old and went on to live a peripatetic life, bouncing back and forth between her father's new family and various other relatives... until we find her in Chicago" "as a 15-year-old schoolgirl... and pregnant, two years before Conroy was born." "The poor baby." "She bounced around." "Ardella." "Nobody raised her right, so she didn't know no better." "Just looking for love." "Looking for love." "Mmm, mmm, mmm." "Now, Courtney, that's a map." "Mm-hmm." "And it shows the distance between the house in which your grandmother Ardella lived when she gave birth to your father, Conroy, and the house of the Coopers, his adoptive parents." "It's literally right around the corner." "Wow." "You see how close it is?" "Mm-hmm. 1, 2, 3 blocks." "Wow." "So I wonder if he knew her." "He was close enough to be able to." "Yep." "Just around the corner." "Mm." "I mean, basically, at a certain point, your father could have gone for a walk, and even if he didn't know, he would have walked past his real mother's house." "Wow!" "I mean, the question I have is, you know, how much did my dad know of what his mother went through?" "In which case, he was..." "That's something that he may not have wanted, there'd be no way that he was gonna..." "Mm-hmm." "He had to reinvent himself, and as did she, you know..." "Absolutely." "I've been helping people discover their roots for a decade, and I've learned that it requires a special kind of courage to seek out what's been left unsaid." "Silences often mask deep wells of pain." "Our 3 guests had faced that challenge and begun their journey." "Next they would uncover stories that connected them to one of our country's most divisive and painful historical episodes:" "Slavery." "We'd given Stephen, who began his journey with no relatives on his father's side, a lineage tracing all the way back to Ireland on one branch of his father's tree." "Now we're going to introduce him to another paternal" "William Bowden, his second great grandfather, who was 33 years old when the Civil War broke out and who'd made the unusual decision to volunteer for the Union army despite his own southern roots." "Take a look at this document, Stephen." ""William T. Bowden, Company K," ""120th Regiment, Indiana Infantry." "36 years, height 6 feet."" "Tall for that time." "That's right." " Dark." " Black." "Black." "Cannon County, Tennessee." ""Farmer."" "You can almost picture this guy, right?" "Yeah." "How does it feel to see that your ancestor served in the Civil War?" "I'm amazed." "I don't know if I should be or not, because a lot of people did serve in the Civil War, but it's more interesting to me to know that I have southern roots." "Oh, really?" "Yeah." "And I had no idea, no idea of that." "Hmm." "And he's from Tennessee, and he still fought on the right side, so that's a good thing." "That's a good thing." "But that's not all we found." "Wow!" "Now, Stephen, this group of military documents shows that William was one of 6 brothers to serve in the Union." "6?" "6." "You could count them." "John F. Bowden, Enoch Bowden," "Elza Bowden, William, Raleigh, and James." "And you had no idea about this?" "Mm-mmm." "Southerners signing up for the Union army were unusual, although not unprecedented." "Their loyalty to the Union was often borne out of economics, feelings about slavery, or simply their love of their country and and anti-secessionist beliefs." "We discovered that the father of these 6 Union soldiers," "Enoch Bowden, was Stephen's third great grandfather." "And this gave us some clues as to why Stephen's ancestor chose to fight for the Union in the first place." "Enoch was born in the south in 1801, but in 1836, he abruptly moved his family north to Indiana, where he served as a leader of the Methodist church and a judge." "Why do you think your ancestor moved his family from Tennessee... right... out to this frontier?" "Why move to Indiana?" "Any ideas?" "Oh, if I had to guess, I might guess that they just... saw a good deal in another part or wanted a fresh start." "There are all kinds of possibilities." "Could you please turn the page?" "Yeah." "This is a page from a book published in the year 1901, and it's about the pioneers of this county." "Oh, my God." "Look at this." "Good for them." ""Enoch Bowden and his wife, like many others, left their native state on account of slavery there."" "How about that?" "It's good." "It's good, something to be proud of." "It's better than turning the page and finding out he left because he shot somebody in a barber shop." "Yeah." "In 1830, Tennessee was a huge slave state." "Almost 20% of its population was composed of slaves." "Did you know that?" "No, I didn't." "Can I believe that maybe they didn't like it on a moral basis?" "Of course." "As a matter of fact, you're absolutely right." "As a Methodist, Enoch may very well have opposed slavery on moral or religious grounds." "How about that?" "Pretty good guy, I think." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Hmm." "Methodists in the North and the South had long been divided over the issue of slavery." "By 1845, the discord forced an acrimonious split, and the Civil War only intensified the bitterness between the two sides." "Stephen's ancestors' beliefs had been profoundly tested, and ultimately they'd make courageous choices." "How does it make you feel to know that these ancestors on your father's lines had such a purchase on American history?" "You know... what I make of it is just sort of I'm kind of set back on my heels by this whole process." "It's a little bit like having a stage and having somebody turn on lights on different parts of the stage so that you can see things you never saw before." "Mm-hmm." "Lot to contemplate." "A lot." "A lot." "The dark history of slavery touches many of our guests in this series in some way, discovering which side an ancestor took on this divisive issue or locating the name of your ancestors who actually served as slaves." "These confrontations with the truth of the American slave past can be quite emotional, but very few times have we ever plumbed the depths of slavery and discovered what we unearthed for Gloria Reuben." "We had already introduced Gloria to her white Jewish relatives on her father's side of the family." "Now we wanted to introduce her to the black relatives on her mother's side of the family." "For this, we headed straight back to Jamaica." "Remarkably, we were able to trace her mother's family back 5 generations, where we discovered the names of two of her slave ancestors," "Thomas Higgins and Elizabeth Martin," "Gloria's third great grandparents." "The Jamaican slave registries allowed us to make a very rare breakthrough, one that most African-Americans can only wish for." "This is a Jamaican slave register from the year 1817." "Can you read that name?" "Leonorah." "Leonorah is your great great great great great grandmother." "Oh, my God!" "But can you read the transcribed line?" ""Leonorah, 50 years old, African."" "That is your original African ancestor." "You've found her name, her age, and her birth date." "Nobody has found that." "Nobody." "This is something black people only dream of finding, and you found her." "She is your link to the continent." "She came here on the Middle Passage." "What's it like to see the name of your ancestor listed as property?" "It's unsettling, to say the least." "When you were making "Lincoln," did you think about slavery in your own family tree?" "No." "I didn't think there was any, frankly... but just because I didn't know." "Oh, sure." "Sure." "Look at this." "This, Gloria Elizabeth Reuben, is your family tree." "Unwrap that sucker." "Wow." "Trace up this line." "Here you are." "Yep." "Go all the way up." "Who's at the top?" "Leonorah." "I cannot tell you how rare..." "This is as rare as... genealogically as rare can get." "Ha!" "It's like hitting the genealogical slave lottery." "Ha ha ha!" "Wow." "You've just gone today from having no family tree to the richest family tree back to slavery that we have ever traced." "Wow." "Gloria's ancestors had taken us on an unprecedented journey, from Jamaica all the way back to Africa." "Courtney Vance also wanted to learn more about his slave ancestors and wondered whether it was even possible to connect to that past." "We'd already traced his father's family tree to Courtney's grandmother Ardella and back 4 more generations." "So now we turned to his mother's family to see how far back into slavery we could trace her lineage." "We discovered a record for Courtney's great great grandfather, John T. Janey, who was born in Maryland around 1842, almost two decades before the start of the Civil War." "At this time, the black population in Maryland was split almost evenly..." "60% slave, 40% free." "When w broke out, President Lincoln strategically allowed" "Maryland to keep its slaves in return for remaining in the Union." "Could we find out whether Courtney's great great grandfather had lived through those turbulent decades as a slave or as a free man?" "Can you see where it's from?" ""Baltimore Sun," 1858." ""John Janey, age 22, light-brown color, 5'5"," ""has a scar upon on of his great toes from the cut of an axe." ""If taken in a slave state, I will give $200." "Joseph Griffiths."" "Do you know what this means?" "What are they talking about?" "It means that your ancestor John Janey was a runaway slave, and that is an ad to get his black behind back." "So he took off." "He split." "Right." "He is a slave." "We found him through a slave advertisement." "How did you find this?" "Heh heh heh!" "This was in the paper." "In the paper." "John Janey." "Wanted man." "Got famous." "Negro ran away." "On the run." "Now, this is a page from a very famous book called "The Underground Railroad."" "Your great great grandfather is in this book with all the runaways..." "My goodness." "Could you read the passage?" "Oh, my goodness." ""September 10, 1858." "John Janey." ""Color brown, well formed, self-possessed and intelligent."" "Yeah." "Must be in the genes, brother." "Right." ""He says that he fled from master Joseph Griffiths" ""of Calvert County, Maryland." ""He referred to his master as a man of 50 years of age with a wife and 3 children." ""John said that she was a large, portly woman with an evil disposition."" "Runaway slaves were presumed safe if they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line and made it to the North, but all that changed when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern citizens to return runaways." "So what happened to John T. Janey once he reached the Union side in 1861?" ""John Janey, the 22nd Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry."" "He served in the United States Colored Troops." "Wow!" "You ever see "Glory"?" "Mm-hmm." "He was there." "To actually know that my great great grandfather was in the Colored Troops..." "Mm-hmm." "Wow." "The Emancipation Proclamation officially gave black soldiers, including former slaves, the right to fight for the Union and to bear arms in combat against white Confederate soldiers." "And Courtney's great great grandfather," "John T. Janey, was one of nearly 9,000 black men from Maryland who served in the United States Colored Troops." "How does it make you feel?" "Very proud." "Very, very proud." "This is a photograph of Lincoln's funeral procession." "Was the regiment there?" "Your great great grandfather's regiment marcd in the funeral." "Wow." "He was there in the Lincoln processional." "Wow." "Look at that." "Somewhere in that photograph is your great great grandfather." "Wow." "My-my head is spinning." "It's mind-boggling." "It..." "He was in the Union army, and he was a runaway." "Yes." "In the procession for Lincoln's funeral." "Yes." "It's like the trifecta, man." "Ha ha ha!" "Oh." "So I want you to take a look at this, my brother." "This is your complete family tree." "I have mine framed in my kitchen." "It's yours to take away today." "Those are your ancestors that we were able to find." "Look at that." "When you walked in today, how many of those people had you heard of?" "Maybe one or two..." "Mm-hmm." "On my mom's side." "Look at this tree." "These are all your father's ancestors that we found." "This is amazing right here." "It's amazing." "Mmm, mmm, mmm." "I'm..." "I'm..." "My back is a little straighter." "Mm-hmm." "Hmm." "You know where you're from, you know who you are and where you're going." "You got to know where you're from." "We had reached the end of the paper trail for all 3 of our guests." "So it was time to see what DNA analysis could tell us about their more distant past." "Genetic genealogy allows us to look back thousands of years to discover our guests' deepest origins." "Stephen, Gloria, and Courtney all agreed to take DNA tests to unlock the geographical ancestry imprinted in their genomes, allowing us to understand something called their genetic admixture... the percentages of their ancestry from different worldwide populations." "For Stephen King, master of mystery, could we uncover anything that would surprise him?" "Ha ha ha!" "I'm 99% European, baby!" "Ha ha ha!" "I am the whitest man you've ever interviewed in your life." "That is just about true." "Yeah." "The records we found on our paper trail had taken" "Gloria Reuben's family tree as far back as the 1700s in Jamaica and even back to Africa." "We wanted to see if DNA science could help uncover more about her racially mixed background." "OK." "59.3% European." "59.3% European." "Sub-Saharan, 38.7%." "38.7%." "Mm-hmm." "So although you were crowned, Gloria Elizabeth Reuben," "Miss Black Ontario, you are actually far more European than African." "Ha ha ha!" "All the people woofing on you were right." "Ha ha ha!" "So basically I'm a Jewish girl in a black body." "You are..." "You are a Jewish girl in a..." "That was so not P.C." "No, that was great!" "No, that's great!" "We knew how important it was to Courtney Vance to find some closure on his search for his father's roots." "His grandmother Ardella's paternity case had indeed been closed, but somehow the 11-month pregnancy defense used to clear the reverend didn't satisfy Courtney, and it didn't satisfy us." "Remarkably, some 80 years later, with the advances of DNA science, we can help him conclusively answer the question that had haunted Courtney about his father's paternity." "Well, Courtney, we were able to locate a descendant of Reverend Warren, and they agreed to take a DNA test to see if it matched yours." "Would you please turn the page?" "Oh, boy." "Here's a map of your DNA." "You have 23 chromosomes." "Any match between your DNA and the great grandchild of Reverend Warren would appear to be red." "Do you see any red segments?" "No." "There aren't any." "So the court actually was right." "Reverend Richard Warren is not your biological grandfather." "Mm-hmm." "OK." "OK?" "But there was one more test that allowed us to leap over missing generations to find his more distant ancestors." "It's a very specific test of a man's y-DNA." "Y-DNA is an identical genetic fingerprint passed down from father to son in a direct paternal line for hundreds, even thousands of years." "In other words, if there's a man walking around with your identical y chromosome, that means you two have the same male ancestor." "And we found him." "No!" "Turn the page." "Stop it." "You have a perfect match with a man named." "Dr. James Arrington." "James Arrington is a doctor in Lewisville, Arkansas." "Your y-DNA is identical to his." "That means you share a common male ancestor on your father's father's line." "So..." "So his family?" "It is possible that your father's father was an Arrington." "Arrington." "He kind of looks like me." "Wow." "And, Courtney, there were a lot of Arringtons in Chicago when your grandmother Ardella lived there." "Really?" "Mm-hmm." "Right." "That would be..." "Got to talk to him." "Yep." "How do you think your dad would have felt to know?" "I don't know." "I wish I could have found out." "Yeah, I do, too, buddy." "Wish he could have hung around so I could have seen this day, but my mother's gonna see it, and my sister's gonna see it and the children and all that." "So that's a victory." "Started out today knowing almost nothing about your ancestors." "How do you feel now?" "I feel that now I can..." "I can begin the next phase, which is being able to get in touch with people." "Mm-hmm." "And I just want to go to a family gathering." "I want to start to... to reconnect." "As you could see with our 3 guests tonight, the power of genealogy to connect us to our past can be personally transformative." "Thank you for the gift of doing so." "Thank you." "Stephen King, Gloria Reuben, and Courtney Vance all closed their books of life with a much fuller idea of testors from whom they descended, and with that, a clearer sense of who they are today." "Join me next time when we unlock the secrets of the past for 3 new guests on another episode of "Finding Your Roots."" "Next time on "Finding Your."" "Next time on "Finding your Roots,"" "legendary athletes Derek Jeter" "Billie Jean King, and Rebecca Lobo get into the game of genealogy." "That's unbelievable." "The Jeter name came from a slaveowner." "I don't know how many generations I've been here." "Did not know we had any Jewish ancestor." "Wow!" ""Finding your Roots.""