"I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr." "Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."" "In this episode, we're traveling back in time to meet the ancestors of journalist Anderson Cooper, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and playwright Anna Deavere Smith... 3 gifted storytellers, who vividly chronicle the lives of others" "but who know little about their own family history." "To discover their ancestors, we've used every tool available." "Genealogists help stitch together the past using the paper trail their ancestors left behind, while geneticists utilize the latest advances in DNA analysis to reveal secrets thousands of years old..." "This is your Book of Life." "And we've compiled everything into a Book of Life." "Where'd you find this picture?" "You're gonna make me cry." "Wow!" "This is getting better and better and better." "This is mind-blowing." "I can't believe you didn't call me up and tell me this in advance." "The genealogies of Anderson Cooper," "Ken Burns, and Anna Deavere Smith all intersect at a critical time in American history... the Civil War." "Taken together, they show us just how profoundly one seminal event can connect the lives of 3 total strangers today." "He was the coolest guy I've ever met, and when we were kids..." "Anderson Cooper is one of the most intrepid television journalists of our generation, fearlessly delivering firsthand accounts of the devastation caused by war, famine, and natural disasters all around the world." "For many trapped in the rubble of downtown Port-au-Prince, the struggle to live continues." "People on the street say there's a 15-year-old who's buried alive there, and that they're talking, but..." "The fact that Anderson chose the grueling life of a correspondent on the front lines is even more remarkable given the rarified world in which he was raised." "Born on June 3, 1967," "Anderson is the son of writer Wyatt Cooper and high-society heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt." "His mother's name was synonymous with style and fashion." "Gloria Vanderbilt jeans were the must-have item for almost every young American woman in the late 1970s." "At his childhood home in New York City," "Anderson's parents hosted some of the world's most influential writers, artists, and entertainers." "I always assumed that..." "I don't know... that everyone had Charlie Chaplin come to their house, and Truman Capote was over for dinner and all these interesting people." "To me, it just seemed normal." "It wasn't really until I was probably... 11 years old, suddenly people started showing up on the street with my mom's name on their backside." "My brother and I had this game of how many people we could see in a day had my mom's name on their bottoms." "Ha ha!" "And I started to realize, "Wait a minute."" "This is not so normal."" "But their bubble of comfort and glamour would soon be punctured by tragedy and loss." "Anderson was 10 years old when his father Wyatt Cooper died from a heart attack." "10 years later, Anderson's brother Carter committed suicide." "It drove me to go overseas and become a reporter and to go places where people were suffering, because I wanted to understand loss and understand survival and figure out how I could survive in the world." "I think a lot of people who experience loss, particularly early on in your life," "I think it made me much more empathetic." "We've lost two of the people in this picture, so, you know, there's not much of our family left, and that's a strange thing to realize." "Ken Burns is one of the country's most celebrated documentary filmmakers." "His films on the Civil War and the history of jazz and baseball, are etched into the national consciousness... not just for their scope but for their signature style as well." "Is there anything in particular that you're hoping to learn today?" "The biggest thing is that my last name is Burns." "My father's name was Robert." "His father's name was Robert." "And throughout my upbringing, we were told by relatives that we were somehow tangentially related to the poet Robert Burns." "In fact, every bookcase in my family has Burns volumes." "Mine is no exception." "Ha ha ha!" "All right, well, we'll deal with that last, so you don't get up and walk away." "Ha ha ha!" "Ken was born in 1953 in Brooklyn." "He was just a boy when his father Robert, a cultural anthropologist and film fanatic, took him to the movies." "Before long, Ken was hooked." "I thought that I would be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks." "These were the directors of the films my father shared with me." "You know, nobody pressured me to be an anthropologist or a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief." "I was allowed to be what I wanted, and I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker." "You know, this is where episode two of "Vietnam" is being edited..." "Like Anderson Cooper," "Ken Burns experienced loss at an early age." "In his case, it was his mother Lyla Tupper, whose death, Ken says, helped shape the kind of filmmaker he would become." "My mother died when I was 11 of a cancer that began when I was two." "And there was never a moment in my childhood where she wasn't dying and there wasn't the apprehension on the part of a very small boy that something really terrible was going to happen." "Do you feel in some way that she or her death inspired you to be a storyteller?" "Yes, in a way." "I had a really close friend who said," ""I bet as a kid, you blew out your candles wishing she'd come back."" "I said, "Yeah, how'd you know?"" "And he says, "Look what you do for a living."" "And I said, "What do you mean?"" "He said, "You wake the dead."" "He said, "You make Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass"" ""and Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong come alive." "Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?"" "Mm-hmm." "I mean, I have this fierce desire to do well, making films about American history, but I want to do them really, really well, and that's for her for sure." "I remember standing with you, getting ready to go in." "We were like kids." "We were so excited." "Actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has had roles on popular TV series like "The West Wing,"" "and "Nurse Jackie."" "But she's best known for writing and performing her groundbreaking one-woman shows on subjects ranging from the L.A. riots to the American presidency." "Anna uncnily transforms herself into multiple characters, bringing to life a menagerie of personalities by perfectly mimicking their voices and their mannerisms." "I'm basically an Americanist." "That's what I've been doing, is thinking that I can find America by listening to how people talk." "What I've been trying to do is to embody and become America by becoming the voices." "Here we are... and we're still alive, and we hope that people will be alive when we come out." "Born in 1950 to schoolteacher Anna Young and coffee merchant Deavere Smith," "Anna came of age in Baltimore, just as racial integration was trying to take hold." "So, these are Black folks in Baltimore during the Depression." "This is my grandmother." "I don't know how she did it." "She took in laundry." "Early in childhood, Anna honed her keen skills of observation, carefully watching and listening." "Both at school and back at home." "Look at how little the cat is..." "No matter what was happening, if the family was there, if I was up in my room," "I'd be listening, and I loved hearing people talk and loved watching people, loved looking at my aunts and uncles when they came." "They were very different..." "my father's side." "They were glamorous." "What do you mean they were glamorous?" "They were jazzy people." "My mother's side was more humble." "So I was very, very interested in who came from outside and looking at them." "I've spent my career searching for "the other" rather than for myself, and it makes me want to know more as a matter of history about my people and how they lived." "I would love to know their stories." "Anderson, Anna, and Ken artfully examine the lives of a wide range of historical and contemporary figures." "Tonight, I'm going to connect them with characters from their ancestral past and share stories that have long been hidden in the branches of their family trees." "That's incredible." "I had no idea." "We started with Anderson Cooper." "Born and raised in Manhattan," "Anderson's Vanderbilt relatives played a major role in New York City's development." "In fact, we're interviewing him today at one of his family's former Upper East Side mansions." "This was your family house, man." "Could I have a room when I come down from Boston?" "I wouldn't mind living here now." "It's pretty nice." "You recognize this person?" "That's Cornelius Vanderbilt." "Yeah, we think that he looks a bit like you." "Really?" "Yeah." "There is a family resemblance." "Yeah, I can sort of see it." "Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, Anderson's third great-grandfather, transformed his small ferryboat operation into one of the largest shipping and railroad companies in the world." "When he died in 1877, the Commodore was worth more than $100 billion in today's currency, easily making him one of the richest men in the history of the United States and cementing the Vanderbilt family legacy." "There's a huge statue of your third great-grandfather Cornelius in front of Grand Central Station." "I actually thought, as a kid... and this is gonna sound absurd..." "I thought that all grandparents turned into statues when they died." "Ha ha!" "Along with magnificent monuments and grand buildings, the Vanderbilts left behind a much darker legacy of family turmoil." "As a young girl, Anderson's mother Gloria found herself at the center of a heated and public custody battle that Anderson said tore their family apart and left his mother estranged from her Vanderbilt relatives." "My mom was taken away by the courts from her own mother when she was 10 years old, the height of the Depression, and given to an aunt who she didn't know." "I always knew growing up that it was an extraordinarily painful thing for my mom and something that we never really talked about." "And I grew up very happy that I didn't have that Vanderbilt name, because I think that name comes with a lot of baggage." "You know, people always ask me about my mom's side of the family, but when I think to myself that I come from people," "I think that I come from the Cooper side." "Anderson's father's life connects him to deep Southern roots." "My dad loved Mississippi." "He loved being from Mississippi, and he loved the stories that he grew up with and all the people he grew up with." "And he wanted it very much to be part of my life and my brother's life." "You even say it right..." ""Missippee."" ""Missippee." Yes, exactly." "Yeah." "Unlike his Vanderbilt ancestors, whose story is part of American history books," "Anderson knows very little about the Cooper family, so we wanted to tell him more about these Southern roots." "Remarkably, our genealogists trace the Cooper line back 150 years in Mississippi." "To Anderson's great-grandfather, a man named William Preston Cooper." "You recognize this man?" "I've never seen this." "That is your great-grandfather, and his name was William Preston Cooper." "Wow!" "God, I've never seen this picture." "We discovered that Anderson's great-grandfather and much othe Cooper family were not originally from Mississippi but part of a wave of settlers who migrated to the Deep South seeking their fortunes cultivating cotton." "The invention of the cotton gin created the biggest economic boom in American history, and by the early 1800s, planters like Anderson's ancestors wanted a piece of the action." "I made my way to Mississippi to see what I could learn about how they fared." "Were Anderson's Southern relatives among the lucky ones who made fortunes from King Cotton?" "Using census records from 1850 and 1860, we were able to piece together a picture of what life was like for Anderson's Cooper relatives after they arrived in Mississippi." "Now, you're looking at excerpts from the census records of some of your paternal ancestors." "Wow!" "This is amazing." ""William Anderson, farmer," owning $100 worth of land." "Mm-hmm." ""Edward Bull, farmer," owning $500 worth of land." ""J.G. Berry, planter," owning $250 worth of land." "Does this exactly look like Rhett Butler in "Gone With The Wind"?" "No." "Yeah, there were no Cooper plantation houses, as far as I know." "You got that right." "Your father's ancestors were small farmers and laborers." "And they followed cotton into the deep South, but they never got rich." "And they hardly owned, as you can see, any property at all." "I mean, it shouldn't surprise me, because I've seen the picture of the house my dad grew up in, and it's a shack." "I mean, it's... you know, it was a pretty hardscrabble existence." "Contrary to popular belief, most white Southerners of that period didn't own big plantations." "For every major landowner, there were thousands of small farmers struggling just to make a living, much like Anderson's relatives." "Because they farmed so little land, we wondered what role Anderson's Mississippi ancestors played during the Civil War." "Were they among the more than 1 million Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve the Southern way of life?" "Sifting through Civil War service records, we found the answer." "This is a service record of your great-great-grandfather." "It's incredible." "How'd you find this?" "This is crazy." "That's Robert Fletcher Campbell, and he was born in 1822, and he volunteered to fight for the Confederacy." "I didn't know any of this." "It's funny." "As a kid, I always viewed the Civil War as the war between Mama's side and Daddy's side." "Yeah." "Mommy's side won." "Mommy's side won, yeah." "In fact, Robert Campbell was just one of several of Anderson's Southern relatives who fought for the Confederacy." "His second great-grandfather Burwell Cooper served alongside his father-in-law in the Alabama infantry, while his great-great- grandmother's 5 brothers also served the South." "In fact, your family..." "like a one-family Confederate Army." "Oh, great." "And what's fascinating, Anderson, is that none of these people owned any slaves." "Wow." "So they didn't own slaves, but they still fought for the Confederacy." "They volunteered to fight for the Confederacy." "That's really interesting." "Anderson's ancestors are examples of a rather surprising fact about the men who joined the Confederacy." "Only a small percentage actually owned slaves." "So, the average Southern soldier wasn't a slaveowner, just regular guy." "I guess when you think about it, it makes sense that it's sort of aspirational, isn't it?" "I mean, people sort of fight for what they hope one day to be able to achieve or the opportunity that they think it may bring them, you know, what they believe is possible." "Um... this is sort of research center... looking for still photographs, finding them." "From the time he was a boy," "Ken Burns had had a keen interest in the Civil War, and he's always known which side of the conflict he'd be on." "This is so cool, man." "In the anticipation of the centennial of the Civil War, my brother and I were given a Civil War set." "I, as the tyrannical older brother... which he would more than quickly agree..." "I made him always be the Confederates, while I was the Union." "Ha ha ha!" "But during the making of his magnificent "Civil War" series," "Ken was shocked to discover that he had ancestors who ught on the side of the Confederacy." "Still, there was much he didn't know about his family's experiences during the war." "To give him a fuller picture, we took a closer look at a man who was living in Virginia when the war broke out." "Born in 1833, he's Ken's great-great-grandfather" "Abraham Burns." "Abraham Burns was 29 years old when he enlisted in John McClanahan's Horse Artillery Company, fighting for the South during the last years of the war." "Buried in a Civil War archive, we discovered a detail about his service that we didn't expect." "We found a document which shows Ken's great-great-grandfather was one of more than 200,000 Confederate soldiers imprisoned during the war, but surprisingly, he was among those given the opportunity to win back his freedom but only if he swore an oath of allegiance to the Union." "That's unbelievable." ""Roll of Prisoners of War Camp Chase, Ohio," ""who have applied for the oath of allegiance" ""from December 1-15, 1864." ""States that he was conscripted and forced to join the Rebels."" "Do you really think that was true?" "Um, no." "I think that was a likely story, you know." ""I didn't want to do it."" ""They forced me to do this, man."" ""I love Abraham Lincoln."" "Ha ha! "I love Abraham Lincoln."" "You've said that have "No sentimentality about the cause"" "that the South was fighting for, but you've also defended Confederate soldiers such as your ancestor." "Well, I'm not sure defend is the right word." "You just have to accept your family." "You can't undo it." "You can't undo it." "You don't look at that old photo album of you with the paisley shirt and wide collars from the seventies and rip th out." "You go, "No." "That was true."" "So I think this is true." "I have great-great-grandfathers who fought for the North." "I just think that Abraham Burns because he's in that direct eyesight of my life... that is to say, he's my grandfather's grandfather... this is a big deal, and it's something I didn't expect," "being someone in support of the Union." "But Abraham Burns is not Ken's only Civil War ancestor." "We found another one." "Also named Abraham, his story has been hidden in Ken's family tree for generations." "Born in Virginia, as well, he's Ken's second great-grandfather..." "Abraham Smith." "Have you ever heard of Abraham Smith?" "Well, I'm assuming that he's the Smith that gives my grandmother her last name." "That's right." "Could you please turn the page?" "Can you read what it says at the top of the page?" "No." ""Slave schedule 1860."" "Unbelievable." "You know what that means." "Indeed." "Your third great-grandfather..." "Abraham Smith... owned 6 slaves in 1860, a year before the Civil War broke out, including an 11-year-old girl." "Any idea that you had slaves in the family?" "You know, I've sort of assumed that it was impossible not to have been... touched by it, but this still hurts, and another Abraham, to boot." "I got Confederate privates and Virginia slaveholders." "Hmm." "That puts the Civil War in another perspective." "You know..." "I don't feel guilty because I know this is process, this is true, you know, but at the same time, there's a kind of sadness." "I now have personal connection to this thing that I find so repugnant and so un-American and yet such a peculiarly American institution, which is slavery and all the things that go with it, and that's interesting because my mother never mentioned that." "My grandmother would not have mentioned that, though I'm sure..." "I mean, this is the thing." "If you don't talk about it, then the next generation forgets it, and they don't talk about it." "That's true." "My mother's house, 6-bedroom house, burned down." "It was so sad, but this is one of the few remaining photographs." "Silences through the generations have left Anna Deavere Smith with little knowledge of her own family history." "Like many African-American families," "Anna's ancestors chose to look to the future rather than dwell on a painful, troubled past." "My grandfather actually didn't tell me anything much about his family, and I spent a lot of time with him, and I was a listener, so that's odd." "So many of our stories, particularly for black people, have been lost because people just didn't want to talk about the past." "It was just too much, too much to bear." "Right." "We wanted to help Anna unearth her deepest roots, to see what stories were buried there." "Almost immediately, we uncovered something quite remarkable about Anna's heritage." "Not only is she descended from slaves but from a long line of free people of color, as well." "You have a free negro lineage going back to 12 years after the end of the American Revolution." "Boy." "There's no excuse." "I should have made something of myself." "Ha ha ha!" "Never, ever crossed your mind that you would have free negro ancestors in your family tree?" "Oh, I didn't know." "I didn't know." "Just 3 generations into Anna's past, we discovered a free black ancestors she didn't even know existed, her great-great-grandfather, a man named Basil Biggs, and we found this life so extraordinary, we wanted to share all of it with her." "You recognize those people?" "Whoa!" "No!" "Anna, meet your great-great-grandparents." "Wow!" "That's Basil Biggs." "Right." "Well, I have an uncle Basil." "Yes." "Well, now you know why." "Wow!" "And that is your great-great-grandmother Mary Jackson." "Mmm." "You never heard of these people?" "Never." "Basil Biggs and Mary Jackson were both born in Maryland around 1820, and by 1850, more than a decade before the start of the Civil War, the United States Census indicated that Basil and My were married and free." "In 1858, Basil, a free man of color and a veterinarian, moved his wife and 4 children from the slave state of Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania." "But he couldn't have chosen a more dangerous place to move." "In the summer of 1863, just 5 years after arriving in Pennsylvania," "Basil Biggs would find himself right in the middle of one of the most devastating battles in the history of war... the Battle of Gettysburg." "Now, this obituary, Anna, is for Celia Biggs Penn," "Basil's daughter, who died in 1936, and it gives us a sense of what your ancestors did in the fateful days right before the battle." ""Mrs. Penn," "Last of Kin Who Fled '63 Battle, Dies."" ""The only colored persons in this section," ""the Biggs family was warned to leave this section with the approach of the Confederate troops."" "OK, so..." "Wow!" "Your ancestors fled..." "Unbelievable." "The Confederate invasion." "Now, remember, it's 3 days of combat, right?" "Right." "And Basil's farm was converted into a field hospital..." "Huh." "By the Confederates." "My God, that's a story right there." "That's an amazing... that's a play." "Basil and his family fled the Confederate invasion just in the nick of time." "As the fighting dragged on, desperate soldiers ransacked the countryside for food and shelter." "When the battle was over, the Biggs family returned to find their farm in ruins." "They had lost everything:" "Their furniture, their livestock, and their crops." "Not only did they find their property destroyed, but the landscape around Gettysburg was littered with rotting corpses." "Wow." "Now, I'm sure you've seen this famous image of the horrifying aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg." "And for you, Anna, it illustrates the situation that your great-great-grandfather confronted in 1863." "He saw that there was a job to be done..." "Mmm." "A job that nobody else wanted to do." "Mmm." "Uh-oh." "Could you please turn the page?" "Oh, my God." "Oh." ""Basil Biggs..." ""colored of Gettysburg, was given the co..." ""the contract" ""for disinterring the bodies on the field." ""He had a crew of about 8 or 10 Negroes in his employ."" "The rapidly decomposing bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers were both a morbid reminder of the toll taken by the war's bloodiest battle and an impending health hazard." "The United States government had to do something about this, and quickly." "So they contracted with a white Gettysburg resident, who hired Anna's great-great-grandfather to do the grisly, nightmarish work of exhuming Union soldiers from their shallow graves." "It took nearly 8 months, but Basil Biggs and his crew buried thousands of corpses into neatly ordered rows of graves in what would become the Gettysburg National Cemetery." "These free black men cleared the way for the Address that began with these immortal words..." ""Fourscore and 7 years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation."" "Basil and his team made it possible for Abraham Lincoln to deliver his Address that fall." "But you have a purchase on American history at one of its foundational moments." "I have to tell you that, you know, I had a play that didn't work very well about American history called "House Arrest."" "And there are lots of things that people tell you to criticize your work that are upsetting." "But the most upsetting thing to me about the way people criticized that work is that they said that I should go back and do what I've been doing, the stuff that's about me, which is about race riots..." "Mm-hmm." "As if I don't have any claim on American history." "Mmm." "And I would always say, "You know, I really don't appreciate that,"" "not knowing anything about this." "But to now know some things about my people, it's really upsetting to be relegated to this one place." "I have to tell you that this is very, very, very, very powerful, and if you hadn't invited me to to do this," "I could have lived my life without having ever read this paragraph." "Many African-Americans like Anna know very little about their families before the end of slavery." "One reason is the natural impulse to suppress the details of a painful past." "But noble stories like that of Basil Biggs have to be remembered and retold." "They must become part of our national narrative." "For Anderson Cooper, we discovered a story about one of his forefathers so disturbing that his family had completely erased it." "We've already introduced Anderson to his ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, even though they had littl or no financial stake in the Southern way of life." "While researching his Cooper family, we discovered someone who did have a real stake in the Antebellum South." "Born in Burke County, Georgia in 1787, this man is Anderson's fourth great-grandfather," "Burwell Boykin." "This is part of the 1850 Census..." "Wow." "And it shows that your ancestor." "Burwell Boykin, wh he owned at the time." "Total acres of land... 620, cash value of farm... $6,000." "$6,000." "That's a lot of money back then." "That's serious money and that's a lot of land." "And researchers believe that he was the most successful farmer in your family during the entire 19th century." "That's amazing." "$6,000." "That's incredible." "But as we dug a little deeper, we found that land was not the only thing that Burwell Boykin owned." "Wow." ""Slave Inhabitants in the County of Choctaw, Alabama, 1850."" "These are slaves he owned?" "These are the slaves he owned." "Wow." "Your fourth great-grandfather owned 12 people, ranging in age from 1 to 60." "Oh, my God." "That's incredible." "Did you know about that?" "Never heard anything about it." "Having family from the deep South," "I'm not surprised that there's some... you know, at least one slaveholder." "But I also kind of always thought my relatives were so poor that they wouldn't have had slaves." "Well, you're almost right." "It's really depressing, especially when you see the ages, and the fact there are no names I just find so disturbing." "I'm sort of curious by the blank spaces on this ledger." "What kind of master do you think he was?" "I shudder to think." "We found the answer to that question in a most unlikely place... the United States Census." "One of the most commonly used documents in our research, the Federal Census revealed something that we've never seen in all our years of ancestry investigation, and it shocked us." "Now, this is the..." "Wow!" "1860 U.S. Census." "Holy crap!" ""Burwell Boykin,"" ""cause of death..." "Killed By Negro."" "Boykin was murdered by a rebellious slave." "Wow!" "Your ancestor was beaten to death with a farm hoe." "Oh, my God!" "That's amazing." "This is incredible." "Heh heh heh!" "I am blown away." "You think he deserved it?" "Yeah." "You do?" "I have no doubt." "It's a horrible way to die, Anderson." "He had 12 slaves." "I don't feel bad for him." "Heh heh!" "OK." "Honestly, part of me thinks that's awesome." "But it is your blood ancestor." "Yeah, so I don't want to offend other relatives of mine." "I feel bad for the man who killed him, and I feel bad for the 11 other unnamed people who..." "God only knows what happened to them." "The avenging slave who killed Anderson's fourth great-grandfather was hanged without a trial, retribution for his bold act of rebellion." "So you can see the slaves did rebel, but they rebelled in small ways..." "Small ways." "With devastating personal consequences." "Yeah." "I wish I knew more." "I wish I knew the name of the slave." "Mm-hmm." "You know, when you think about how many people's names history just never remembers and people whose stories are never told..." "Absolutely." "It's shameful, and I feel such a sense of shame over it." "At the same time, it's the history of this country." "The Civil War ancestors of our 3 guests are a cross-section of the American expeence during the most pivotal time in our nation's history." "With Ken Burns, we shared some unexpected things about two of his ancestors, one held as a prisoner of war, and the other, who held slaves." "But when we moved up his family tree, we found that Ken has an ancestor who played a unique role in a much earlier conflict." "He's Ken's paternal fifth great-granather," "Gerardus Clarkson." "Now, this is an excerpt from the minutes of the Council of Safety in New York from September 16, 1776." "The Council of Safety was a patriot organization during the Revolutionary War." ""Resolved, that a house be taken for a hospital," ""Resolved, that Dr. Gerardus Clarkson be appointed to attend the sick in the said hospital."" "Your fifth great-grandfather, Dr. Gerardus Clarkson, was a surgeon..." "Wow." "For the Board of War in 1776 and 1777." "I think that's very cool." "That is very, very cool, you know." "Ken's fifth great-grandfather's experience with the crude, often barbarous surgical techniques used during the Revolutionary War made him a leading advocate for modernizing medicine." "In fact, we came across a document that revealed the role that Dr. Clarkson played in the founding of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, an institution dubbed" ""the birthplace of American medicine."" "Your ancestor helped the medical profession advance beyond the horrendous practices of the war and encouraged the advancement of modern medicine." "That is very cool." "That is very cool." "Ken's Revolutionary War ancestry doesn't end with Gerardus Clarkson." "We also found another ancestor on his mother's family tree who played a different role in this country's battle against colonial rule." "Born in 1754 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, he's Ken's maternal fifth great-grandfather, and bears the unusual name of Eldad Tupper." "Wish I'd had that name." "Well, I don't have a boy, but Eldad is great." "You know, when your kids have kids..." "Eldad." "Got to be there." "Eldad." "Well, I'm gonna call up my daughter, who is pregnant right now with the first son that we've seen for years." "That's his name." "So Eldad, you know?" "Heh heh!" "Now, Ken, this is a military muster roll from 1778, during the height of the American Revolution." ""Seconded officers," ""regiment they belonged to..." "Lt. Eldad Tupper."" "At this time, Massachusetts, of course, was a patriot stronghold." "But do you see the Massachusetts Brigade or State Infantry number here anywhere?" "Regiment..." "I don't see it." "Is it here?" "Am I missing it?" "No, Ken." "There are no State Infantry numbers because the Continental Armies were not on this chart." "Your ancestor was a Loyalist." "Oh, no!" "A Tory!" "Now, God help me." "He fought for the Brits!" "OK, let me just take back everything" "I said about Eldad and the name." "This name, Eldad, is dying a final death back in... 1832 in Brockville, Canada." "See?" "Of course, he's in Brockville." "That should have been the kicker." "We know why he's in Canada." "You got that right." "He was not down with George Washington." "He was with King George." "Your fifth great-grandfather was a Loyalist." "He served aboard a British ship for more than a year." "Ha!" "You go, "Na, na, na, na, na." Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha!" "He was later honorably discharged, to his credit, in Halifax and he moved to Elizabethtown Township in upper Canada to live out his days." "Now, what do you think of that?" "You have ancestors who fought on both sides of the American Revo... they could have been shooting at each other." "This is the thing I'm most ashamed of." "I am humiliated by this part, right, because I bleed red, white, and blue, and this is... not the Union Jack..." "Ha ha!" "And this is... terrible." "Ha ha!" "I just... this is so cruel." "I mean, this is the way this works, right?" "You tease with a doctor here and a lawyer there, and then, all of a sudden, you've got a slaveowner..." "Ha ha ha!" "And then you've got a Tory." "Genealogy giveth and genealogy..." "Taketh away." "Ha ha ha!" "While we were surprised to find that Ken had ancestors on opposite sides of the colonial conflict, that wasn't all we discovered about his relatives from that era." "We found that Gerardus Clarkson, the Revolutionary War surgeon, connects Ken to another ancestor who helped heal the nation's wounds." "Your ancestor, Gerardus Clarkson, connects you to one of America's greatest heroes." "Can you guess who that might be?" "Well, my greatest hero is Abraham Lincoln, so I'm hoping that this is where that line goes." "There he is." "Ha ha ha!" "Abraham Lincoln is your fifth cousin, 4 times removed." "Wow!" "I..." "I need a little bit more respect now." "Ha ha!" "And you are one of the few Americans who is related to a Confederate private on one line..." "Named Abraham." "Yes, and another Abraham who happened to be the president of the Union." "What do you think your Confederate ancestor would think if we brought him back?" "Who the hell cares?" "It's Abraham Lincoln." "I mean, this is the bee's knees." "This is the guy that I have in my soul." "You know, this is just too good to be true." "Ha ha!" "It's amazing." "I love it." "Before Ken's ancestor, Abraham Lincoln, could deliver his most famous Address," "Anna's ancestor, Basil Biggs, first had to clear the many dead bodies from the battlefield at Gettysburg." "Basil was left with the task of rebuilding his life, and so we were eager to tell Anna how her great-great-grandfather and his family made out." "Now, Anna, this is Basil and Mary Jane on the farm that he bought after the Civil War." "Wow." "Boy!" "Mm-hmm." "Your great-great grandfather used the money he earned digging up all those dead bodies and reburying them to rebuild his life, purchasing a new farm where the family could live and thrive." "Makes me proud." "Could you please turn the page?" "Now, this article appeared in the "Cleveland Gazette" in 1892." "Whoa." "It tells the story of a Mr. Scotland who met Basil when he visited Gettysburg." ""He is a veterinary surgeon and is reputed to be the wealthiest... "." "What?" "!" ""He is a veterinary surgeon and is reputed" ""to be the wealthiest Afro-American in Gettysburg." ""He has a large practice" ""and his residence is a magnificent one, surrounded by 120 res of land."" "It's incredible." "Incredible." "How could your family have lost the story of this man?" "His picture should have been up over everyone's mantelpiece." "Or they just didn't talk about it." "Mm-hmm." "They just didn't talk about it." "Why wouldn't they talk about it?" "Of all the stories that we uncovered, we saved the most remarkable one for last, a story showing that there was even more to the improbable life of Anna's ancestor, the free man of color, Basil Biggs." "This is your great-great grandfather's obituary, and it's a testament to his many achievements, and it tells us about Basil's most impressive accomplishment of all." ""Leading Colored Citizen Was An Active Agent." "In The Underground Railroad."" "He was a conductor." "Wow." "That's incredible." "And there it is in black and white." ""While slavery existed, he was an active agent in the underground railroad, helping fugitives to freedom."" "Oh, this is amazing!" "This man was... amazing." "The Underground Railroad involved a vast network of people who, like Basil Biggs, provided safe haven for slaves escaping bondage in the South." "Runaway slaves who made it across the Ohio River or the Mason-Dixon Line could find refuge in the network's web of secret locations." "You see, Basil was in a unique position to help, precisely because he was a veterinarian, which gave him reason to travel without raising suspicion." "And, Anna, the kicker is what he was doing was breaking the law." "It was a federal offense to do what your great-great-grandfather did." "But great thinkers..." "Martin Luther King among them, later, from a Birmingham jail... make a clear line between a just law and an unjust law." "Mm-hmm." "He didn't break a moral law, but he broke a law that was an unjust law." "It means a lot to me." "Absolutely." "I mean, a federal offense." "Right." "His freedom and all those children." "Yeah." "And he could have just had a very nice life." "Yeah." "Free black man making huge sacrifices to raise his family, willing to risk everything to help other African-Americans escape from slavery." "Now, that is the definition of heroism." "Boy, it's very powerful, I have to say." "Wow." "Amazing." "We traced the family histories of our guests back centuries and learned that each of them has ancestors deeply rooted in the founding and shaping of our country." "Now, this is your family tree on both sides." "Wow." "While Anderson's Cooper family roots went far deeper into the American South than he ever suspected, he was even more surprised to find a rags-to-riches story on his mother Gloria's family tree." "We discovered that his first Vanderbilt ancestor arrived here from the Netherlands in the early 17th century with little more than the clothes on his back." "But of all the ancestors to whom we introduced him on his family tree, the one he wanted to meet the most was one he already knew." "If you could meet, through the wizardry of a time machine, any one of your ancestors, who would it be?" "Well, this may sound silly, but, um... if I could meet anybody, I'd meet my dad." "Oh, yeah." "That doesn't sound silly." "Yeah." "If I could sit down and interview anybody," "I'd sit down, interview him, and just find out... what he thinks of me and, um, you know, what he thinks of, uh..." "all that's gone on." "I know what he'd think about." "He would admire you, man." "He'd be proud." "Wow!" "That is your family tree." "For Ken Burns, who always wanted to know if he was a descendant of the poet Robert Burns, the paper trail ran cold and didn't confirm his family's legend." "So we turned to the science of DNA." "All 3 of our guests took DNA tests to unlock their genetic ancestry." "We compared the DNA that Ken inherited from all of his ancestors to known relatives of the Scottish poet... and we got lucky." "You know what that means?" "He's a cousin." "You are related to Robert Burns." "Yahoo!" "This is a slam-dunk." "You have it in your genome." "You are indeed related to Robert Burns." "It's not a direct line of descent, but you are cousins of some kind." "Fantastic." "Now, these are all the ancestors that we found." "We couldn't tell you..." "For Anna Deavere Smith, like so many African-Americans, most of her paper trail ends where freedom begins, after slavery, so we wanted to see what DNA could tell us about her origins." "Well, I would like to know where I come from in Africa, if you were able to find that out." "While most African-Americans descend from ancestors taken during the transatlantic slave trade, few are able to identify the ethnic group or the region they came from back in Africa." "To find out, we compared Anna's DNA results with those of modern-day Africans, allowing us to look back thousands of years and pinpoint her ethnic roots in Africa, long before the Middle Passage." "Can you read what it says there?" "That I'm from the Igbo tribe." "Right." "You share maternal ancestry from the Igbo people..." "In Nigeria." "In present-day Nigeria." "Wow." "Now, I know you've traveled in Africa." "Have you ever spent time in Nigeria?" "No." "But when I was in Uganda..." "Mm-hmm." "I went to visit a place where they did traditional healing." "Mm-hmm." "And the doctor who was in charge of this, he came to me and said that one of the," "I guess, witch doctors wanted to know if I would like to be blessed by my ancestors." "And so I said, "Well, of course I want to be blessed by my ancestors,"" "and you know what the blessing was?" "Hm-mmm." "I got spat on 3 times with mouthfuls of banana beer." "So this acquaintance with my ancestors is a lot more..." "Ha ha!" "Tame than that, and even when you said, you know, "You're on for quite a ride,"" "I'm glad I didn't get spat on." "Ha ha ha!" "Was it a ride?" "This was a ride." "Thank you." " Great." " Anderson Cooper," "Ken Burns, and Anna Deavere Smith all close their books of life with a much clearer idea of the colorful people from whom they descend, and a fuller sense of who they are." "Join me next time, when we reveal the secrets of the past for 3 more guests on the next episode of "Finding Your Roots."" "Next time on "Finding Your Roots,"" "actors Ben Affleck and Khandi Alexander and civil rights leader Ben Jealous discover the many branches of their family trees." "Oh, wow!" "That is incredible." "I feel like I belong to something bigger than me." "It makes me feel very lucky." ""Finding Your Roots.""