Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2012–…): Season 8, Episode 8 - Songs of the Past - full transcript
GATES: I'm Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.
Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."
In this episode, we'll travel
to New York City to meet
actors Nathan Lane
and Leslie Odom, Jr,
two men who followed
their dreams to Broadway
are now going to meet the
ancestors who paved their way.
LANE: Well, this is very
exciting, it makes me want
to have a party.
ODOM: What a, what a
miracle we all are.
That these small and big
decisions that people made
before we got here,
made us possible.
GATES: To uncover their roots,
we've used every tool available.
Genealogists helped stitch
together the past from the
paper trail their
ancestors left behind.
LANE: Oh my lord!
GATES: While DNA experts
utilized the latest advances
in genetic analysis to reveal
secrets hundreds of years old.
Did it ever occur to you that
you descend from a white man?
(laughing).
ODOM: No!
GATES: And we've compiled
it all into a book of life.
A record of all of
our discoveries.
LANE: There's so much I haven't
known about all of these people,
and the fact that you've gone
back this far is overwhelming.
ODOM: It is a real
re-imagining of self.
GATES: My guests have
given voice to iconic roles,
inspiring audiences
around the world.
In this episode, they're going
to meet a cast of characters
every bit as dramatic as the
people they've played on-stage.
Hearing stories, both tragic
and uplifting, that have
never been told before.
(theme music plays).
♪ ♪
♪ ♪
GATES: On Broadway, Nathan
Lane is a veritable king.
A fearless, utterly brilliant
entertainer, who's packed
theaters for decades,
delighting audiences
with his irrepressible wit.
♪
Just like Cain and Abel
♪
♪
You pulled a sneak attack
♪
- ♪
- I thought that we were brothers
♪
♪
Then you stabbed
me in the back
♪
♪
Betrayed!
♪
♪
Oh boy, I'm so betrayed!
♪
GATES: But the man who's brought
so much joy to so many has only
done so by setting aside a
great deal of private pain.
Nathan grew up in Jersey City,
New Jersey, the son of a
truck driver, and his
childhood was fraught,
as his father struggled
with a drinking problem
that his mother proved
powerless to stop.
What were they
like as a couple?
LANE: How much time
do we have, Dr. Gates?
GATES: You can take your time.
LANE: Um.
What I knew of them as
a couple was not good.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
LANE: The one thing I remember
though this one time I was at
a celebration, like a holiday
or Christmas celebration and
people were dancing, and my
mother and father were there
together, which was a rare
thing, and they said to them,
oh, get up and dance, you were
always the best dancers, and
I was quite shocked because
I never thought of them in
that way, and my mother and
father got up and started...
(Crying).
Sorry.
And they started to dance,
and they were fantastic.
I mean, just, they were
dazzling, and I was like,
who are these people?
Who are they?
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: And look, look at
how in sync they are.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And how not in sync
they are on a personal level.
GATES: So, you could see
why they fell in love.
LANE: Yeah.
It's the only time I can
remember where they seemed
genuinely happy together.
Yeah.
GATES: This singular memory is
all the more poignant because
of what came next.
Before his 12th birthday,
Nathan's father had died of
alcoholism, and his mother
had begun to battle
clinical depression.
Nathan sought refuge on
the stage, and it saved him,
giving him confidence,
and allowing him to create
a new identity, a transformation
that was completed when
he learned that his
birth name, Joseph Lane,
was already being
used by another performer,
meaning that in order to
join the Actors' Guild,
he had to pick a new name.
LANE: I can remember vividly,
there was a woman behind a desk,
and she said you're going to
have to change your name,
and it was
sort of traumatic.
I was very, very surprised and
she said, it's alright,
you can take your time,
think about it, and I said,
just give me a minute and I sat
down and I had played in
summer stock I had played
Benjamin Franklin in "1776".
GATES: Uh-huh.
LANE: And I had also played,
Nathan Detroit,
in "Guys and Dolls",
in a non-equity dinner theater
in Cedar Grove, New Jersey,
and these were two
of my favorite roles and
I thought, okay, I'll either
be Nathan or Benjamin Lane.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And I thought for about
five minutes and I went over
to her and I said, Nathan,
I'll be Nathan Lane.
GATES: Uh-huh.
LANE: And I just
thought it's a new beginning.
I'm no longer Joe Lane.
I'm now Nathan Lane.
Whoever he's going to be.
GATES: "Nathan Lane," of course,
would become a phenomenon:
the winner of three Tony awards,
along with myriad
other accolades.
But from Nathan's own
point of view, one of the most
significant moments of his life
occurred far from the spotlight,
with his career
still in front of him,
when he told his mother
that he was gay,
marking a new phase in
their relationship.
LANE: I was living with her in
Rutherford at the time and
I was starting to see someone in
New York, and I was going to
move to New York, and
he was one of reasons,
but I had told her
I was seeing a girl
because I didn't
want to upset her.
GATES: Of course.
LANE: And then finally, before
I left home, I sat her down
the night before and I said,
you know, you know,
we've been through
a lot together and
I've never lied to you, and so
I know I told you I was seeing
a girl, but I'm seeing a guy,
and she you know, she
went pale and she said,
you mean you're a homosexual,
and I said, I guess so,
and she said,
I would rather you were dead,
and um, and I said,
I knew you'd understand.
But she you know, eventually
she came to terms with it.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: And success
in show business...
GATES: That helps.
LANE: Forgives all sins.
GATES: I like that.
Was she a tough critic?
LANE: She...
GATES: She
attended your shows?
LANE: Oh yes. Yes.
The thing she always said
to me, which is so sweet,
she would say, I'm not saying
this because I'm your mother,
I'm saying it because it's
true, you were the best one.
GATES: My second guest is
Leslie Odom, Jr, who came to
fame originating the
role of Aaron Burr in
the smash hit "Hamilton".
♪
Wait for it
♪
- ♪
- Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it
♪
♪
I am the one thing in life
I can control
♪
- ♪
- Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it
♪
- ♪
- I am inimitable
♪
♪
I am an original
♪
GATES: The performance won him
a Tony award and launched a
career that shows no
sign of letting up.
But to hear Leslie tell it,
the key factor in his success
is not his magisterial talent,
but rather good luck,
which has accompanied
him since birth.
Indeed, his childhood was
almost the mirror opposite
of Nathan Lane's.
Leslie grew up with parents
who actively supported him,
in an environment where he
felt completely at home:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
ODOM: I feel so fortunate to
have grown up in that town.
One of the final stops on
the underground railroad.
I mean, not that there
isn't racism in Philly, but,
I guess, always integrated
school and, and always, um,
Black teachers and, and,
and always proud and...
GATES: Hmm.
ODOM: You know, all of my
friends were, were brilliant and
beautiful and, and, you know,
it was, it was a given
that you, could, could
speak well, could hold your
own in conversation.
You might have some talent at
an instrument or be able to
sing or dance or something.
You were gonna
get good grades.
I mean, you know, I didn't
get such great grades but,
you know...
There was, you know, I,
I ran in a, I ran with a,
with a talented set and,
and of mostly Black people.
GATES: Hm.
ODOM: You know, so, uh, it
was later when people tried to
make me feel ashamed of it
or tried to make me feel less
than because of the color
of my skin, it wasn't...
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: It wasn't on
the streets of my town.
GATES: Leslie's hometown
would be his launching pad.
He began singing as a child
in his family's church,
and ended up attending the
Philadelphia High School for
Creative and Performing Arts.
Along the way, he discovered
he had a unique gift, and a
chance encounter with an iconic
piece of musical theater
gave him a sense of
what he could do with it.
ODOM: I was about 13, 14
years old when this show
came out called "Rent".
GATES: Oh, sure.
ODOM: And, um, I didn't so
much wanna be in entertainment
or, I didn't, certainly wasn't
thinking I was gonna be in
television or movies.
But I wanted to be in "Rent".
I really did think that...
I will work hard and one
day I will be in "Rent".
And I will do that until I'm,
I dunno, 40, 45 years old
and then you retire, right?
Like, like, that's...
GATES: Right.
ODOM: I couldn't see
farther than that.
GATES: Sure.
ODOM: That was my ambition.
GATES: Bizarrely, Leslie's
"ambition" became his reality.
When he was just 17
years old, he auditioned for
the touring company of "Rent",
and found himself as a
replacement member of
the ensemble, on Broadway.
It was a start, and Leslie
would spend more than a
decade trying to build on it,
taking roles wherever
he could get them,
before honing in on
"Hamilton",
when it was still
in development,
and persuading its creators
to give him the part of
Aaron Burr, the ne'er
do-well-founding father
with the show-stopping numbers.
It was a life-changing moment,
and Leslie still savors it.
That whole production did
so much for colorblind casting,
for race relations.
You know, people
forgot you were Black.
I mean, they could see you were
Black but you were Aaron Burr.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: That was,
that's magical.
ODOM: I had a desire to, um,
to help paint a fuller picture
of our humanity.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: It's a strange thing that
I ended up doing that through
Aaron Burr's story.
But yeah, I was the avatar.
And so people got to see
a young Black man as this
complicated, I hope
interesting, flawed,
beautiful human being.
I wanted to be as beautiful
and flawed and brash and bold
and brilliant as the
people that I know.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: As the
people that raised me.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know?
And so I got to do that.
If I never get to do it
again, I got to do it once.
GATES: Leslie and Nathan
have realized their childhood
ambitions against great odds,
and gained a measure of
confidence that
flows from that success.
But when it comes
to their roots,
that confidence
is less apparent.
Each told me they had
questions about entire
branches of
their family trees.
It was time to provide
them with some answers.
I started with Nathan Lane.
His questions were focused
upon his father, Daniel Lane,
whose early death left Nathan
with little more than a
handful of haunting memories.
LANE: I can remember walking
to school one day on this very
bright sunny day, and as I was
walking, I was passing a bar
and the backdoor was open, and
I happened to glance and I saw
my father sweeping up in this
bar, like obviously to pay for
drinks, and I remember he
stopped and realized he was
being watched and he
turned at looked at me.
We just stared at each other...
GATES: Hmm.
LANE: And then he went
back to sweeping,
and I went on to school.
You know, he was someone I'm
still trying to figure out.
Who he was, and what happened,
and why he was so unhappy.
GATES: Given his father's
life, it was no surprise that
Nathan had almost no knowledge
of his roots.
Nathan told me that he knew that
both of his grandparents were
Irish immigrants, but
beyond that, this side of
his family tree
was a blank slate.
We began to fill it in,
starting with the passenger
list for a ship that arrived in
New York on June the 5th, 1884.
On board was an Irish family of
eight, headed by a 40-year old
laborer named
Bartholomew Lane and
his 36 year-old wife, Bridget.
Nathan, that records the
moment your grandfather
arrived in the United States.
LANE: Wow.
But who's Bartholomew?
GATES: Bartholomew and Bridget
are your great-grandparents,
and those are their
other children,
your grandfather's siblings.
LANE: Wow.
GATES: What's it like
to learn their names?
LANE: Well, this
is very exciting.
It makes me want
to have a party.
A family gathering.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: To discuss this.
Bartholomew?
GATES: Bartholomew.
Isn't that a cool name?
LANE: That's a very cool name.
This is really incredible.
GATES: Nathan wondered
why his ancestors had
chosen to immigrate.
Our research suggests their
motive was likely economic.
By 1884, when they left for
America, Ireland was three
decades past the great
potato famine, but poverty
and deprivation were
still widespread.
What's more: Irish
farmers were facing a
wave of evictions amidst
plummeting agricultural prices.
This created a phenomenon
known as "assisted immigration",
a polite term for the
removal of people who
were so poor that it seemed
more effective to pay their
way out of the country than
to provide them with relief.
Newspaper articles from the
era indicate that the ship
that brought Nathan's family
here, the SS Furnessia,
was full of such people.
GATES: So, they were
kicking them out, in effect.
They were assisting them out.
They were
showing them the door.
LANE: It's just a
nice way of saying it.
GATES: These assisted
immigrants made up about
half of the more than
1,300 passengers.
And on previous voyages of
that ship, the Furnessia,
the ship, Nathan,
averaged 400 passengers.
So, three times as many people
were crowded onto that ship to
be assisted to leave Ireland.
LANE: My lord.
I didn't know any of this.
GATES: We now set out to
see what we could learn about
Nathan's family back in Ireland.
Records in County Kerry,
where the family lived
for generations as landless
tenant farmers, suggest
that they weren't exactly
flourishing in their homeland.
LANE: "Died 1st of May, 1878
in Claddanure, Hanora Hallisy,
70 years, laborer's widow.
Cause of death,
cough two weeks.
GATES: That's your great-great-
grandmother's death record.
LANE: And she had a
cough for two weeks?
GATES: Yeah.
For two weeks.
So, you know, that was a
sign of what the illness was.
LANE: A touch of consumption...
GATES: It could've been, yeah.
LANE: They used to say in the
movies.
GATES: Indeed.
LANE: Oh, he had a
touch of consumption.
GATES: But probably so.
It could have been
tuberculosis, which was
consumption, or pneumonia.
And you see that other name
there, Batt, and Batt is short
for Bartholomew.
LANE: Bartholomew.
GATES: Yes.
Your great-grandfather.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: He was Hanora's
son-in-law, and he served as
the informant on her
death certificate.
LANE: His, his mark occupier?
GATES: Yes.
And you know what that means?
LANE: No.
GATES: It means he signed
with an X, that he couldn't
read and write.
LANE: Oh. Interesting.
GATES: So, he
likely got no education.
LANE: No.
GATES: And just went
straight to work as a child.
What's it like to see
that in black and white?
LANE: I'm just blown
away by all of this.
And, uh... Wow.
That's a tough life.
GATES: Nathan's ancestors were
fortunate in one regard.
Irish genealogy is notoriously
challenging because historical
records are very limited.
But Nathan's family left
traces of themselves behind,
allowing us to take him
back to a wedding held in the
township of Claddanure
almost two centuries ago.
LANE: Denis Hallisey,
Honora Falvey married.
Witnesses: Timothy
and Peter Sullivan."
Their gay neighbors.
They had a lot of brunches.
A lot of
brunches in Claddanure.
GATES: You just read the
marriage record for your
great-great-grandparents,
Denis Hallisey and
Honora Falvey.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: In 1835.
That record is almost
200 years old,
and it still exists.
Isn't that amazing?
LANE: Totally.
Totally amazing.
And uh... It does give you a
different sense of yourself
because you know
where you came from.
GATES: Mh-hmm.
LANE: I guess I haven't,
I haven't known that.
There so much I haven't known
about all of these people and
the fact that you've gone
back this far is overwhelming.
GATES: Does it change the way
you think about your father?
LANE: Well, the people he
came from, yeah, you just
keep seeing the word laborer.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: Laborer.
GATES: Right.
LANE: Laborer and he was a
laborer for a long time as well.
And um yeah, you know, it
makes me want to talk to him
you know, my father again and
talk about this you know,
how much he might have
known or heard about.
GATES: Mh-hmm.
LANE: And it certainly
makes you even more
appreciative of how, of all
the good fortune that's come
my way when you
look back and see
what they had to
do to survive.
GATES: Much like Nathan,
Leslie Odom, Jr was about to
see his roots
traced back centuries.
But whereas Nathan had
suspected that we'd be
taking him to Ireland,
Leslie had absolutely no idea
where we were headed.
Our journey began with
his mother's father,
a man named Benjamin Nixson.
Growing up, Leslie spent
a good deal of time with
Benjamin, but even so,
he struggled to capture
his grandfather's
colorful personality.
ODOM: My grandfather,
was, uh ...
How to describe him, man?
First gun I ever saw was on
my grandfather's nightstand.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know...
And that he left it out.
And he saw me see it.
And he didn't hide it.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: And there was, uh,
there was a different woman,
uh, in his,
you know, in his bed.
You know, we, we'd go visit
grandpa and we'd, you know,
meet whoever the
nice lady was.
That was occupying
his beds, you know?
For the time being.
And, um...
GATES: That's why
he needed the gun.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: 'Cause somebody's
husband gonna come in there.
(laughs).
ODOM: Yes, and there were...
GATES: Old
Benjamin, he was a player.
ODOM: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Grandad, uh, enjoyed
his life, I think.
GATES: While Benjamin may have
been open about weapons and
romance, his roots
were another matter entirely.
Leslie told me that he knew
absolutely nothing about the
deeper origins of
the Nixson family.
Even so, he and I were
both surprised when we found
Benjamin's father, a man who
shared his name, in the 1925
census for Brooklyn, and
saw where he came from.
ODOM: "Ben Nixson. Lodger.
Black. 25.
Nativity, South Africa.
Number of years in the U.S.
One year. Alien.
Occupation, chef."
GATES: Your great-grandfather
was born in South Africa.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: Now, I
know you saw "Roots".
And one of the reasons people
do this show is to find out
where they're from in Africa.
But I just told you
where you're from.
ODOM: Right. Right.
GATES: You, were
from South Africa.
ODOM: That's great.
GATES: So when all of the
Black friends that you know
are, uh, searching for their
African ancestry back in the
depths of slavery, yours
was right there in the
20th century, brother.
ODOM: Okay.
GATES: You know, right at
the height of the jazz age...
ODOM: Yeah, he
moves to Brooklyn.
GATES: This African
came here and settled.
ODOM: He comes
to New York City. Yeah.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: He goes, "Hey, I heard
about Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington, I'm
gonna check it out."
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Leslie's
great-grandfather may have
enjoyed New York, but
there was a mystery here.
When he arrived, South Africa
was a part of the
United Kingdom, yet we
found no records in either
South Africa or in England
showing Benjamin
leaving his country.
And we could find no record
of his arrival in America.
So how did he get here?
We uncovered a tantalizing
clue in the crew manifest for
a ship that arrived in New York
in November of 1920.
ODOM: "Discharged seaman,
named B. Nixon.
Assistant steward.
Age 23.
Nationality, British."
GATES: Now Leslie, we can't be
sure, but this could be your
great-grandfather,
Benjamin Nixon.
ODOM: Hmm.
GATES: Arriving in the United
States as a ship's crewman.
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: This is
the only record...
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: That even got close to
being of the possibility of
registering the arrival of
your great-grandfather...
ODOM: Sure.
GATES: Into the United States.
ODOM: Sure.
GATES: The fact that
this man is listed as
an assistant steward, would fit
your great-grandfather's
reported job as a chef
in the 1925 census we saw.
Because ship stewards
helped prepare and
serve meals to passengers.
And if Benjamin was indeed a
crewman on a ship, that would
explain why there were no
immigration records for him.
He was supposed to get back
on that ship, but he didn't.
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: If this is
he, he chose to stay.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: What's it like
for you to learn this?
ODOM: Oh, it's um,
this is wonderful.
My mom's gonna love
to hear that too.
She's gonna love that.
And she'll be floored by it.
Because my grandfather was
very, very murky about his
past with my,
with his children.
GATES: Well, this was a
huge shock to us, too.
ODOM: That's amazing.
GATES: At this point, we
couldn't document the Nixson
family any further.
The name is common in America,
and it's unlikely that
Leslie's ancestors
used it back in Africa.
But turning to another line of
Leslie's mother's family tree,
we came to a story,
just as unlikely,
that we could document.
In April of 1903, Leslie's
great-great-grandfather,
a man named
Samuel Whitfield Taylor,
arrived in New York City,
on a ship, from Barbados!
Did you have any idea?
ODOM: No. No idea.
GATES: So how are you feeling
now to discover that, you know,
your ancestry's much more
complex than you thought?
You are descended from a
recent African ancestor and
recent West Indian ancestors.
ODOM: Yeah, the, the, the time
is a trip, to think that,
to think that it's that recent,
you know, and that they were
coming here willingly.
GATES: Just over
a century ago.
ODOM: Yeah, that's, uh,
I just would not have
guessed that at all.
GATES: Samuel Taylor, or
"SW" as he called himself,
was an immigrant, and a very
successful one at that.
He arrived with less
than $40 to his name,
but by 1918, he was supporting
a wife and four children
by running his own handyman
business, even advertising
in a local newspaper.
He figured out the system.
He became an entrepreneur
in less than 20 years.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: Can you
relate to this guy?
Do you see any of this
entrepreneurial spirit
in yourself?
ODOM: Yeah, you know I'm a,
I'm a small business man
is the way I've
thought about myself
over the years, you know?
And I have my little shingle
hanging up too, and um,
you know, I have,
I have clients,
and I go from job to job,
and uh, and I also have to
have side gigs you know and
things rolling that way.
So yeah, but, but I
would've connected
that kind of spirit, I would've
connected that to my grandpa
Ben, or even to my dad
who was in sales, you know,
before I would've
even connected it
to the immigrant
spirit of S.W. Taylor.
GATES: Unfortunately, this
story was about to darken.
We were able to trace Samuel
back two generations in his
native Barbados, to Leslie's
fourth great grandmother:
a woman named Clementina Inniss.
But when we searched for
evidence of Clementina's life,
we found something painful.
ODOM: "Baptisms.
Date February 9, 1834.
Name: Clementina.
Owner: Owner?
Mr. Bowman Outtrum."
There we go.
GATES: You are looking at
the baptismal record for your
fourth great-grandmother.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: And as you can see,
Clementina was
born into slavery.
She was owned for the
first eight years of her life.
What's it like to see that?
ODOM: Mm.
We were doing so well.
Well, you know.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: But, uh, yeah, to,
it's a, it feels like,
like a hard stop.
GATES: Roughly 600,000 enslaved
Africans were shipped to
Barbados, most worked
on sugar plantations,
under hellish conditions,
but Leslie's
ancestor Clementina was
likely spared this fate.
In 1857, her former owner,
Bowman Outtrum, passed away.
And his will added a new
layer of complexity to
Leslie's family tree.
ODOM: "My remaining funds
shall be divided between
my son, Robert Thomas Outtrum,
and my daughter,
Elizabeth Ann Pile, a widow,
my illegitimate colored son,
John Robert Outtrum,
my illegitimate colored
daughter, Clementina Inniss."
Wow.
She was his daughter.
Clementina was his daughter.
GATES: And he acknowledged it.
(sighing).
ODOM: Yeah.
Sweet little Clementina.
GATES: But you know
what this also means?
Bowman Outtrum is
your fifth great-grandfather.
You descend from
that white man.
ODOM: You know,
we don't, none of us,
none of us choose
how we begin.
GATES: Mm-mm.
ODOM: Clementina didn't
get to choose how she began.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: None of us gets to
decide how, how we get here.
It's a lot to think about.
It's a lot.
GATES: We had one more detail
to share with Leslie:
a record from Barbados that
brought a note of closure
to this chapter of
his family's story.
ODOM: "Burials solemnized
in the Westbury Cemetery in
the parish of St. Michael
in the year 1904.
October 29th,
Clementina Inniss, 78 years."
She lived a long time.
GATES: And think about this,
less than one year
before her burial,
Clementina's grandson, your
great-great-grandfather,
Samuel, would jump on
his ship, leave Barbados,
and sail past the
Statue of Liberty,
and enter the
United States of America
in search of a better
life for him, and for his
little whippersnapper
descendant who played
Aaron Burr in "Hamilton".
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: It's Samuel,
was just two generations
removed from slavery.
ODOM: That's amazing.
GATES: What's it's been like
for you to sit here across
from me and learn all of
these surprising stories
about your ancestors?
ODOM: It opens up that,
that door in your imagination.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: Um, literally and
figuratively, you know,
because you just, you,
there's lots to imagine.
And then, it opens up a door,
uh, for real places and real,
real sights, real
people to meet, um
it is a real
re-imagining of self.
GATES: We'd already traced
Nathan Lane's paternal roots
in Ireland, introducing him
to generations of ancestors
who lived in poverty,
helping to illuminate
his father's troubled life.
Now, turning to Nathan's
mother's family, we found
ourselves in happier
circumstances, focusing on
his maternal
grandmother, Mary Donnellan.
Mary helped raise Nathan,
and he and his brothers
adored her for her
intelligence and her warmth.
Your brother Dan described
her as the smartest woman
he's ever met.
Is that how you remember her?
LANE: Well, um, yeah.
I mean, yes, she was smart,
and, you know, she was um,
she was an extraordinary person.
She kind of took care of
everyone, I mean she was that
person she was there
for everybody, and uh...
GATES: Uh-hmm.
LANE: You know, this picture
of the two of us, it brings
back so many memories,
yeah, I loved her,
I loved her very much.
We were, we were
close, very close.
GATES: Like all of
Nathan's grandparents,
Mary was from Ireland.
But when we began to research
her childhood, we encountered
something unexpected.
She'd received an education
into her late teens,
likely because her
father owned a small farm,
a level of prosperity that
had eluded Nathan's
paternal ancestors.
LANE: Wow.
That's unusual, right?
GATES: That's right.
Your father's family,
as we saw, were landless,
but your mother's family
was a different story.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: Did anyone
ever talk about this?
LANE: No. No.
GATES: It's amazing.
LANE: No.
GATES: Quite remarkable.
LANE: Yeah.
GATES: They owned land and
sent their daughter to school.
LANE: Yeah.
That's really something.
GATES: When Mary was growing
up, most young people in
Ireland finished their
education as children,
and the idea that girls
should be educated at all
was a modern one!
So, Mary was an outlier, and,
as we dug into her roots,
we saw that her family's
modest ascent was quite recent.
Moving back two generations,
we found her grandfather,
James Connor, in a land
survey from 1855,
living with his wife and
children in a two-room farmhouse
in a manner that sounds
decidedly pre-modern.
As you can see, in addition
to farming, James was grazing
some animals, likely sheep or
goats, which means his family
would have had
milk and cheese.
It also means that the family
would probably have brought
their animals into the house
at night to protect against
theft and for
warmth in the winter.
Can you imagine,
a two-room house with sheep?
LANE: Ah, the plot thickens.
I see.
The sheep and the who?
And the goats?
GATES: The sheep
and the goats.
LANE: And they would
cuddle to stay warm.
Wow. That's something.
Wow. I didn't know that.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: That they would do that,
take them into their house,
the animals, to
avoid theft or...
GATES: Yeah.
And to keep them
from freezing.
LANE: And to keep
them from freezing.
GATES: Yeah.
That's right.
I'm going to show
you something else.
Look at the next page.
This is a record from 1868.
Would you please read
the transcribed section?
LANE: "Deaths Registered in
the District of Ballinasloe in
the County of Galway.
Date and Place of Death:
13th November, 1868,
Ballinasloe Work house.
Oh.
Name and surname:
James Connor.
Sex: Male.
Age at Last Birthday:
79 years.
GATES: Nathan, your
great-great-grandfather
died in a workhouse.
LANE: Oh my lord!
GATES: You ever
hear of workhouses?
LANE: Yeah.
Doesn't Scrooge mention,
"are there no workhouses?"
GATES: You got it.
LANE: How awful and
how did that happen?
GATES: To contemporary eyes,
England's "workhouse system"
seems obscene.
The "houses" were essentially
factories equipped
with dormitories.
Once inside, you had
to wear a uniform,
submit to a rigid schedule,
and, if you were
an able-bodied adult,
perform demanding labor.
In return, you were fed
and given a place to sleep.
And in Ireland, especially
in the years surrounding the
great famine,
that was precious.
We don't know why Nathan's
ancestor found himself in one
of these houses, only
that he never left.
LANE: You know, from the
outside, you're looking at
this picture, it
doesn't look so bad.
GATES: No.
LANE: It looks like a
prep school in New England.
GATES: Yeah. Right.
LANE: But behind
those walls...
GATES: Your grandmother never
shared any stories about
what happened to
her grandfather, did she?
LANE: No.
GATES: Well, we can't be sure
of the circumstances that led
him to live in the workhouse,
but he had to end up there
either because the family was
too destitute to support him,
or they had cut off contact
with him for some reason.
LANE: Yeah.
GATES: What's it like to learn
that your ancestor had to
perform menial labor in what
was essentially a voluntary
prison just to get
enough food and shelter?
LANE: Well, the notion that
he lost his farm and lost what
was obviously, for him, a
decent life with his family
and then was subjected to this,
is just a great tragedy
as obviously as many people
were experiencing this as well.
So, it's just a
horrific history.
Wow.
GATES: Do you think that
the trauma our ancestors
suffer gets passed
down to us somehow?
LANE: That's an
interesting question.
Um, I'm sure in
some way it does.
It is a part of you in some
way you're not even aware of.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: You know, maybe that's
where I got my, my...
strength to survive, uh
whether it's the emotional
trauma of a difficult childhood
with you know, parents who
were not doing so well,
or just the trials and
tribulations of show business.
GATES: Sure.
LANE: And the constant ups
and downs, and rejections and
humiliations and so,
maybe that's where
I got my strength.
GATES: We'd already
taken Leslie Odom's
maternal ancestry back to
18th century Barbados.
Now, turning to his father's
roots, we found ourselves on
more familiar terrain: in
the American south, trying to
recover stories buried
in the abyss of slavery.
We soon focused on Leslie's
third great-grandfather,
a man named Alex Dowling.
Alex was likely born around 1850
in Barnwell County,
South Carolina,
seeking to learn more we
found a slave schedule
from that same
year for a white planter
in Barnwell named
"Decania Dowling."
Enslaved people are not listed
by name on this schedule,
but two of these hash marks
represent children who would
have been roughly
the same age as Alex.
ODOM: "One black male, six
months old; one mulatto male,
six months old."
GATES: What's it
like to see that?
ODOM: Well, a very different
experience from what you, uh,
illuminated for me
on my mom's side.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know, I was
expecting something like this.
I was expecting a
little more of this.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: It's still, uh, cloudy.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know, and hazy
is better than nothing.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: I'll tell you that.
But, uh, yeah.
This is, this is sort of
more what I was expecting.
Yeah.
GATES: For many of my guests,
this would mark the end of our
search: with only anonymous
hash marks to guide us,
we can rarely go further.
But in Leslie's case,
we got lucky.
Our researchers noticed that
the planter who filed this
schedule had a son named
"Elijah Dowling", and that
same name appears on the death
certificate of Leslie's
third great-grandfather Alex, as
being the name of his father!
This raised a question:
could Elijah Dowling, the
son of a white slaveowner,
in fact be Leslie's fourth
great-grandfather?
There was only one
way to tell for sure.
We compared Leslie's DNA to
that of millions of other
people in publicly-available
databases,
looking for matches,
and trying to see how those
matches might be related,
a technique that eventually
allowed us to establish
the identity of Alex Dowling's
father beyond all doubt.
You with me?
ODOM: I'm with you.
GATES: Would you
please turn the page.
Would you please read the name
of the man in the red box in
the middle of the chart?
ODOM: "Elijah Henry Dowling."
GATES: Elijah Dowling was,
in fact, Alex's biological
father, which makes him your
fourth great-grandfather,
just as we suspected.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: But the only
way to prove that...
ODOM: Was DNA?
GATES: Was through DNA.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Maybe you weren't as
far away from Aaron Burr
as you thought!
Would you please
turn the page?
ODOM: Who is that?
GATES: That is your
fourth great-grandfather.
That is Elijah Henry Dowling.
ODOM: Oh, really?
Okay.
GATES: That is your grand-pappy.
What do you see
when you look at your
fourth great-grandfather?
ODOM: Uh, what do I see?
Well, I wouldn't, uh, I
wouldn't know to regard him
as family if I, you know,
if I met him and...
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: I, I have no ideas
about the views that he held.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: But just by nature
of the time that he lived
I suspect, that his
views are suspect.
Um, so I don't know.
I don't, you know.
I don't know what
to make of him.
GATES: We had a little more
information to help Leslie
sort out his feelings
about his ancestor.
Records show that
Elijah was a doctor,
a successful farmer, and,
when the Civil War came,
a very eager confederate.
He served as assistant surgeon
of the 1st South Carolina
volunteer regiment
beginning in the
early months of the war!
ODOM: Old South's defender.
GATES: Yep.
ODOM: Okay.
GATES: How does it make
you feel to learn this?
ODOM: I'm an American, you
know, I'm an American,
and so we, i-in the
same way that our,
that our country,
um, is, uh, messy...
GATES: Mmm-hmm
ODOM: And mess, and messed up,
and that, you know,
and that, that,
that, the history,
the book of, the
book of America...
GATES: Yes, that's right.
ODOM: You know, it looks a
lot like this, you know?
GATES: That's, it's true.
ODOM: I'm a, I'm a product of,
of this country, of, um...
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: Proud immigrants.
GATES: Proud immigrants.
ODOM: And, and also of, uh,
this, this part of
our history too, so...
GATES: You got all of it, man.
ODOM: I got all of it.
GATES: On your, on
your family tree.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Now that we'd identified
Alex's father, we wondered
about the circumstances of
his birth, we knew that his
mother, Leslie's fourth
great-grandmother, was a woman
named Rachel, and we suspected
that Rachel, too, was enslaved
by the Dowling family.
We found our proof in the estate
records of Decania Dowling,
Alex's grandfather
had set down his human
property by name
and dollar value.
Giving Leslie a sobering
glimpse of his ancestors.
ODOM: "A list of articles
appraised, belonging to the
estate of D. Dowling,
October 28th, 1857.
Acc, $700.
Rachel and child, $950."
GATES: What's it like to
have this information?
ODOM: Knowing whatever, you
know, the appraisers assigned
to them, whatever couple
hundred measly dollars the
appraisers assigned to
them is irrelevant to me.
But to honor their presence
and to honor their, the fact
that they lived and that
they weren't, things,
that they weren't objects,
is, is deeply meaningful, and,
and rights a
wrong, you know.
So, it's not...
there's not a ton that you can,
that you can give back to them,
but you can give them
back the dignity of...
you know, their humanity,
and just the...
Yeah, you can make
them not things.
GATES: There was a grace note
to this story: as we traced
Leslie's ancestors forward
in time, we found his
third great-grandfather
Alex in the 1880 census,
living with his wife
and four children in
Bamberg, South Carolina,
not far from where he was
enslaved, and yet, truly,
a world away.
Alex now owned a farm,
and 115 acres of land!
In 1870, only about 4% of
rural Black family heads in
South Carolina
owned any land at all.
ODOM: My goodness.
My goodness. Wow.
GATES: But what's it like to
see this and know that your
ancestor Alex was able to
prosper, despite the fact that
his life had begun in slavery?
ODOM: That's powerful.
GATES: Mmm-hmm.
ODOM: That's really powerful.
GATES: What do you think
you've inherited from all
these people to whom
you've been introduced today.
ODOM: It is so
disparate and so varied.
Um, it's hard for me in
this moment to find the
connections, but it's a little
bit of a miracle, you know?
The, it's, it's, uh, the story
of survival, and ingenuity,
and, uh, creativity,
and I'm sure pain.
GATES: Oh, big time.
ODOM: And, uh,
luck, and favor.
And all of that.
So, I'm just happy to be able
to have some specificity about
the way I think about myself,
and where I've come from.
GATES: The paper trail had
run out for each of my guests.
ODOM: Oh, wow.
GATES: It was time to unfurl
their family trees...
ODOM: Wow.
LANE: Oh, my God.
GATES: Now filled with names
they'd never heard before.
LANE: It's just extraordinary.
GATES: Seeing their ancestors
laid out before them,
stretching back centuries,
allowed each to reflect on the
women and men who had
done so much to lay
the groundwork
for their success.
ODOM: To be able to name
roots, to be able to trace
roots is, uh, you know
and remove question marks.
It's, uh, centering.
It's grounding,
pardon the pun, you know?
GATES: No, it's...
ODOM: It's grounding.
GATES: That's a
good word for it.
ODOM: You know, what a,
what a miracle we all are.
You know, that, um, these
small and big decisions that
people made before we got
here, made us possible.
LANE: It is a little
overwhelming to look at all of
those people and know that
you're a part of them now
in a way that I never realized.
GATES: You're a part of them
and they're a part of you.
LANE: Yeah.
And I, I, you know, I
certainly feel that now.
GATES: Does it change
the way you think about
being an American?
LANE: Yes. It does.
It you know, this whole, this
whole book, this whole series
it's like, this is what
this country is based on.
People coming from elsewhere.
GATES: Right.
LANE: Coming here to follow
a dream to you know,
to escape something,
to find something.
You know, it's so much a part
of this country's history.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And it's the
basis of who we are.
GATES: That's the
end of our journey with
Nathan Lane and
Leslie Odom, Jr.
Join me next time when we
unlock the secrets of the past
for new guests on
another episode of
"Finding Your Roots".
Louis Gates, Jr.
Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."
In this episode, we'll travel
to New York City to meet
actors Nathan Lane
and Leslie Odom, Jr,
two men who followed
their dreams to Broadway
are now going to meet the
ancestors who paved their way.
LANE: Well, this is very
exciting, it makes me want
to have a party.
ODOM: What a, what a
miracle we all are.
That these small and big
decisions that people made
before we got here,
made us possible.
GATES: To uncover their roots,
we've used every tool available.
Genealogists helped stitch
together the past from the
paper trail their
ancestors left behind.
LANE: Oh my lord!
GATES: While DNA experts
utilized the latest advances
in genetic analysis to reveal
secrets hundreds of years old.
Did it ever occur to you that
you descend from a white man?
(laughing).
ODOM: No!
GATES: And we've compiled
it all into a book of life.
A record of all of
our discoveries.
LANE: There's so much I haven't
known about all of these people,
and the fact that you've gone
back this far is overwhelming.
ODOM: It is a real
re-imagining of self.
GATES: My guests have
given voice to iconic roles,
inspiring audiences
around the world.
In this episode, they're going
to meet a cast of characters
every bit as dramatic as the
people they've played on-stage.
Hearing stories, both tragic
and uplifting, that have
never been told before.
(theme music plays).
♪ ♪
♪ ♪
GATES: On Broadway, Nathan
Lane is a veritable king.
A fearless, utterly brilliant
entertainer, who's packed
theaters for decades,
delighting audiences
with his irrepressible wit.
♪
Just like Cain and Abel
♪
♪
You pulled a sneak attack
♪
- ♪
- I thought that we were brothers
♪
♪
Then you stabbed
me in the back
♪
♪
Betrayed!
♪
♪
Oh boy, I'm so betrayed!
♪
GATES: But the man who's brought
so much joy to so many has only
done so by setting aside a
great deal of private pain.
Nathan grew up in Jersey City,
New Jersey, the son of a
truck driver, and his
childhood was fraught,
as his father struggled
with a drinking problem
that his mother proved
powerless to stop.
What were they
like as a couple?
LANE: How much time
do we have, Dr. Gates?
GATES: You can take your time.
LANE: Um.
What I knew of them as
a couple was not good.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
LANE: The one thing I remember
though this one time I was at
a celebration, like a holiday
or Christmas celebration and
people were dancing, and my
mother and father were there
together, which was a rare
thing, and they said to them,
oh, get up and dance, you were
always the best dancers, and
I was quite shocked because
I never thought of them in
that way, and my mother and
father got up and started...
(Crying).
Sorry.
And they started to dance,
and they were fantastic.
I mean, just, they were
dazzling, and I was like,
who are these people?
Who are they?
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: And look, look at
how in sync they are.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And how not in sync
they are on a personal level.
GATES: So, you could see
why they fell in love.
LANE: Yeah.
It's the only time I can
remember where they seemed
genuinely happy together.
Yeah.
GATES: This singular memory is
all the more poignant because
of what came next.
Before his 12th birthday,
Nathan's father had died of
alcoholism, and his mother
had begun to battle
clinical depression.
Nathan sought refuge on
the stage, and it saved him,
giving him confidence,
and allowing him to create
a new identity, a transformation
that was completed when
he learned that his
birth name, Joseph Lane,
was already being
used by another performer,
meaning that in order to
join the Actors' Guild,
he had to pick a new name.
LANE: I can remember vividly,
there was a woman behind a desk,
and she said you're going to
have to change your name,
and it was
sort of traumatic.
I was very, very surprised and
she said, it's alright,
you can take your time,
think about it, and I said,
just give me a minute and I sat
down and I had played in
summer stock I had played
Benjamin Franklin in "1776".
GATES: Uh-huh.
LANE: And I had also played,
Nathan Detroit,
in "Guys and Dolls",
in a non-equity dinner theater
in Cedar Grove, New Jersey,
and these were two
of my favorite roles and
I thought, okay, I'll either
be Nathan or Benjamin Lane.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And I thought for about
five minutes and I went over
to her and I said, Nathan,
I'll be Nathan Lane.
GATES: Uh-huh.
LANE: And I just
thought it's a new beginning.
I'm no longer Joe Lane.
I'm now Nathan Lane.
Whoever he's going to be.
GATES: "Nathan Lane," of course,
would become a phenomenon:
the winner of three Tony awards,
along with myriad
other accolades.
But from Nathan's own
point of view, one of the most
significant moments of his life
occurred far from the spotlight,
with his career
still in front of him,
when he told his mother
that he was gay,
marking a new phase in
their relationship.
LANE: I was living with her in
Rutherford at the time and
I was starting to see someone in
New York, and I was going to
move to New York, and
he was one of reasons,
but I had told her
I was seeing a girl
because I didn't
want to upset her.
GATES: Of course.
LANE: And then finally, before
I left home, I sat her down
the night before and I said,
you know, you know,
we've been through
a lot together and
I've never lied to you, and so
I know I told you I was seeing
a girl, but I'm seeing a guy,
and she you know, she
went pale and she said,
you mean you're a homosexual,
and I said, I guess so,
and she said,
I would rather you were dead,
and um, and I said,
I knew you'd understand.
But she you know, eventually
she came to terms with it.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: And success
in show business...
GATES: That helps.
LANE: Forgives all sins.
GATES: I like that.
Was she a tough critic?
LANE: She...
GATES: She
attended your shows?
LANE: Oh yes. Yes.
The thing she always said
to me, which is so sweet,
she would say, I'm not saying
this because I'm your mother,
I'm saying it because it's
true, you were the best one.
GATES: My second guest is
Leslie Odom, Jr, who came to
fame originating the
role of Aaron Burr in
the smash hit "Hamilton".
♪
Wait for it
♪
- ♪
- Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it
♪
♪
I am the one thing in life
I can control
♪
- ♪
- Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it
♪
- ♪
- I am inimitable
♪
♪
I am an original
♪
GATES: The performance won him
a Tony award and launched a
career that shows no
sign of letting up.
But to hear Leslie tell it,
the key factor in his success
is not his magisterial talent,
but rather good luck,
which has accompanied
him since birth.
Indeed, his childhood was
almost the mirror opposite
of Nathan Lane's.
Leslie grew up with parents
who actively supported him,
in an environment where he
felt completely at home:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
ODOM: I feel so fortunate to
have grown up in that town.
One of the final stops on
the underground railroad.
I mean, not that there
isn't racism in Philly, but,
I guess, always integrated
school and, and always, um,
Black teachers and, and,
and always proud and...
GATES: Hmm.
ODOM: You know, all of my
friends were, were brilliant and
beautiful and, and, you know,
it was, it was a given
that you, could, could
speak well, could hold your
own in conversation.
You might have some talent at
an instrument or be able to
sing or dance or something.
You were gonna
get good grades.
I mean, you know, I didn't
get such great grades but,
you know...
There was, you know, I,
I ran in a, I ran with a,
with a talented set and,
and of mostly Black people.
GATES: Hm.
ODOM: You know, so, uh, it
was later when people tried to
make me feel ashamed of it
or tried to make me feel less
than because of the color
of my skin, it wasn't...
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: It wasn't on
the streets of my town.
GATES: Leslie's hometown
would be his launching pad.
He began singing as a child
in his family's church,
and ended up attending the
Philadelphia High School for
Creative and Performing Arts.
Along the way, he discovered
he had a unique gift, and a
chance encounter with an iconic
piece of musical theater
gave him a sense of
what he could do with it.
ODOM: I was about 13, 14
years old when this show
came out called "Rent".
GATES: Oh, sure.
ODOM: And, um, I didn't so
much wanna be in entertainment
or, I didn't, certainly wasn't
thinking I was gonna be in
television or movies.
But I wanted to be in "Rent".
I really did think that...
I will work hard and one
day I will be in "Rent".
And I will do that until I'm,
I dunno, 40, 45 years old
and then you retire, right?
Like, like, that's...
GATES: Right.
ODOM: I couldn't see
farther than that.
GATES: Sure.
ODOM: That was my ambition.
GATES: Bizarrely, Leslie's
"ambition" became his reality.
When he was just 17
years old, he auditioned for
the touring company of "Rent",
and found himself as a
replacement member of
the ensemble, on Broadway.
It was a start, and Leslie
would spend more than a
decade trying to build on it,
taking roles wherever
he could get them,
before honing in on
"Hamilton",
when it was still
in development,
and persuading its creators
to give him the part of
Aaron Burr, the ne'er
do-well-founding father
with the show-stopping numbers.
It was a life-changing moment,
and Leslie still savors it.
That whole production did
so much for colorblind casting,
for race relations.
You know, people
forgot you were Black.
I mean, they could see you were
Black but you were Aaron Burr.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: That was,
that's magical.
ODOM: I had a desire to, um,
to help paint a fuller picture
of our humanity.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: It's a strange thing that
I ended up doing that through
Aaron Burr's story.
But yeah, I was the avatar.
And so people got to see
a young Black man as this
complicated, I hope
interesting, flawed,
beautiful human being.
I wanted to be as beautiful
and flawed and brash and bold
and brilliant as the
people that I know.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: As the
people that raised me.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know?
And so I got to do that.
If I never get to do it
again, I got to do it once.
GATES: Leslie and Nathan
have realized their childhood
ambitions against great odds,
and gained a measure of
confidence that
flows from that success.
But when it comes
to their roots,
that confidence
is less apparent.
Each told me they had
questions about entire
branches of
their family trees.
It was time to provide
them with some answers.
I started with Nathan Lane.
His questions were focused
upon his father, Daniel Lane,
whose early death left Nathan
with little more than a
handful of haunting memories.
LANE: I can remember walking
to school one day on this very
bright sunny day, and as I was
walking, I was passing a bar
and the backdoor was open, and
I happened to glance and I saw
my father sweeping up in this
bar, like obviously to pay for
drinks, and I remember he
stopped and realized he was
being watched and he
turned at looked at me.
We just stared at each other...
GATES: Hmm.
LANE: And then he went
back to sweeping,
and I went on to school.
You know, he was someone I'm
still trying to figure out.
Who he was, and what happened,
and why he was so unhappy.
GATES: Given his father's
life, it was no surprise that
Nathan had almost no knowledge
of his roots.
Nathan told me that he knew that
both of his grandparents were
Irish immigrants, but
beyond that, this side of
his family tree
was a blank slate.
We began to fill it in,
starting with the passenger
list for a ship that arrived in
New York on June the 5th, 1884.
On board was an Irish family of
eight, headed by a 40-year old
laborer named
Bartholomew Lane and
his 36 year-old wife, Bridget.
Nathan, that records the
moment your grandfather
arrived in the United States.
LANE: Wow.
But who's Bartholomew?
GATES: Bartholomew and Bridget
are your great-grandparents,
and those are their
other children,
your grandfather's siblings.
LANE: Wow.
GATES: What's it like
to learn their names?
LANE: Well, this
is very exciting.
It makes me want
to have a party.
A family gathering.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: To discuss this.
Bartholomew?
GATES: Bartholomew.
Isn't that a cool name?
LANE: That's a very cool name.
This is really incredible.
GATES: Nathan wondered
why his ancestors had
chosen to immigrate.
Our research suggests their
motive was likely economic.
By 1884, when they left for
America, Ireland was three
decades past the great
potato famine, but poverty
and deprivation were
still widespread.
What's more: Irish
farmers were facing a
wave of evictions amidst
plummeting agricultural prices.
This created a phenomenon
known as "assisted immigration",
a polite term for the
removal of people who
were so poor that it seemed
more effective to pay their
way out of the country than
to provide them with relief.
Newspaper articles from the
era indicate that the ship
that brought Nathan's family
here, the SS Furnessia,
was full of such people.
GATES: So, they were
kicking them out, in effect.
They were assisting them out.
They were
showing them the door.
LANE: It's just a
nice way of saying it.
GATES: These assisted
immigrants made up about
half of the more than
1,300 passengers.
And on previous voyages of
that ship, the Furnessia,
the ship, Nathan,
averaged 400 passengers.
So, three times as many people
were crowded onto that ship to
be assisted to leave Ireland.
LANE: My lord.
I didn't know any of this.
GATES: We now set out to
see what we could learn about
Nathan's family back in Ireland.
Records in County Kerry,
where the family lived
for generations as landless
tenant farmers, suggest
that they weren't exactly
flourishing in their homeland.
LANE: "Died 1st of May, 1878
in Claddanure, Hanora Hallisy,
70 years, laborer's widow.
Cause of death,
cough two weeks.
GATES: That's your great-great-
grandmother's death record.
LANE: And she had a
cough for two weeks?
GATES: Yeah.
For two weeks.
So, you know, that was a
sign of what the illness was.
LANE: A touch of consumption...
GATES: It could've been, yeah.
LANE: They used to say in the
movies.
GATES: Indeed.
LANE: Oh, he had a
touch of consumption.
GATES: But probably so.
It could have been
tuberculosis, which was
consumption, or pneumonia.
And you see that other name
there, Batt, and Batt is short
for Bartholomew.
LANE: Bartholomew.
GATES: Yes.
Your great-grandfather.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: He was Hanora's
son-in-law, and he served as
the informant on her
death certificate.
LANE: His, his mark occupier?
GATES: Yes.
And you know what that means?
LANE: No.
GATES: It means he signed
with an X, that he couldn't
read and write.
LANE: Oh. Interesting.
GATES: So, he
likely got no education.
LANE: No.
GATES: And just went
straight to work as a child.
What's it like to see
that in black and white?
LANE: I'm just blown
away by all of this.
And, uh... Wow.
That's a tough life.
GATES: Nathan's ancestors were
fortunate in one regard.
Irish genealogy is notoriously
challenging because historical
records are very limited.
But Nathan's family left
traces of themselves behind,
allowing us to take him
back to a wedding held in the
township of Claddanure
almost two centuries ago.
LANE: Denis Hallisey,
Honora Falvey married.
Witnesses: Timothy
and Peter Sullivan."
Their gay neighbors.
They had a lot of brunches.
A lot of
brunches in Claddanure.
GATES: You just read the
marriage record for your
great-great-grandparents,
Denis Hallisey and
Honora Falvey.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: In 1835.
That record is almost
200 years old,
and it still exists.
Isn't that amazing?
LANE: Totally.
Totally amazing.
And uh... It does give you a
different sense of yourself
because you know
where you came from.
GATES: Mh-hmm.
LANE: I guess I haven't,
I haven't known that.
There so much I haven't known
about all of these people and
the fact that you've gone
back this far is overwhelming.
GATES: Does it change the way
you think about your father?
LANE: Well, the people he
came from, yeah, you just
keep seeing the word laborer.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: Laborer.
GATES: Right.
LANE: Laborer and he was a
laborer for a long time as well.
And um yeah, you know, it
makes me want to talk to him
you know, my father again and
talk about this you know,
how much he might have
known or heard about.
GATES: Mh-hmm.
LANE: And it certainly
makes you even more
appreciative of how, of all
the good fortune that's come
my way when you
look back and see
what they had to
do to survive.
GATES: Much like Nathan,
Leslie Odom, Jr was about to
see his roots
traced back centuries.
But whereas Nathan had
suspected that we'd be
taking him to Ireland,
Leslie had absolutely no idea
where we were headed.
Our journey began with
his mother's father,
a man named Benjamin Nixson.
Growing up, Leslie spent
a good deal of time with
Benjamin, but even so,
he struggled to capture
his grandfather's
colorful personality.
ODOM: My grandfather,
was, uh ...
How to describe him, man?
First gun I ever saw was on
my grandfather's nightstand.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know...
And that he left it out.
And he saw me see it.
And he didn't hide it.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: And there was, uh,
there was a different woman,
uh, in his,
you know, in his bed.
You know, we, we'd go visit
grandpa and we'd, you know,
meet whoever the
nice lady was.
That was occupying
his beds, you know?
For the time being.
And, um...
GATES: That's why
he needed the gun.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: 'Cause somebody's
husband gonna come in there.
(laughs).
ODOM: Yes, and there were...
GATES: Old
Benjamin, he was a player.
ODOM: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Grandad, uh, enjoyed
his life, I think.
GATES: While Benjamin may have
been open about weapons and
romance, his roots
were another matter entirely.
Leslie told me that he knew
absolutely nothing about the
deeper origins of
the Nixson family.
Even so, he and I were
both surprised when we found
Benjamin's father, a man who
shared his name, in the 1925
census for Brooklyn, and
saw where he came from.
ODOM: "Ben Nixson. Lodger.
Black. 25.
Nativity, South Africa.
Number of years in the U.S.
One year. Alien.
Occupation, chef."
GATES: Your great-grandfather
was born in South Africa.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: Now, I
know you saw "Roots".
And one of the reasons people
do this show is to find out
where they're from in Africa.
But I just told you
where you're from.
ODOM: Right. Right.
GATES: You, were
from South Africa.
ODOM: That's great.
GATES: So when all of the
Black friends that you know
are, uh, searching for their
African ancestry back in the
depths of slavery, yours
was right there in the
20th century, brother.
ODOM: Okay.
GATES: You know, right at
the height of the jazz age...
ODOM: Yeah, he
moves to Brooklyn.
GATES: This African
came here and settled.
ODOM: He comes
to New York City. Yeah.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: He goes, "Hey, I heard
about Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington, I'm
gonna check it out."
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Leslie's
great-grandfather may have
enjoyed New York, but
there was a mystery here.
When he arrived, South Africa
was a part of the
United Kingdom, yet we
found no records in either
South Africa or in England
showing Benjamin
leaving his country.
And we could find no record
of his arrival in America.
So how did he get here?
We uncovered a tantalizing
clue in the crew manifest for
a ship that arrived in New York
in November of 1920.
ODOM: "Discharged seaman,
named B. Nixon.
Assistant steward.
Age 23.
Nationality, British."
GATES: Now Leslie, we can't be
sure, but this could be your
great-grandfather,
Benjamin Nixon.
ODOM: Hmm.
GATES: Arriving in the United
States as a ship's crewman.
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: This is
the only record...
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: That even got close to
being of the possibility of
registering the arrival of
your great-grandfather...
ODOM: Sure.
GATES: Into the United States.
ODOM: Sure.
GATES: The fact that
this man is listed as
an assistant steward, would fit
your great-grandfather's
reported job as a chef
in the 1925 census we saw.
Because ship stewards
helped prepare and
serve meals to passengers.
And if Benjamin was indeed a
crewman on a ship, that would
explain why there were no
immigration records for him.
He was supposed to get back
on that ship, but he didn't.
ODOM: Mm-hmm.
GATES: If this is
he, he chose to stay.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: What's it like
for you to learn this?
ODOM: Oh, it's um,
this is wonderful.
My mom's gonna love
to hear that too.
She's gonna love that.
And she'll be floored by it.
Because my grandfather was
very, very murky about his
past with my,
with his children.
GATES: Well, this was a
huge shock to us, too.
ODOM: That's amazing.
GATES: At this point, we
couldn't document the Nixson
family any further.
The name is common in America,
and it's unlikely that
Leslie's ancestors
used it back in Africa.
But turning to another line of
Leslie's mother's family tree,
we came to a story,
just as unlikely,
that we could document.
In April of 1903, Leslie's
great-great-grandfather,
a man named
Samuel Whitfield Taylor,
arrived in New York City,
on a ship, from Barbados!
Did you have any idea?
ODOM: No. No idea.
GATES: So how are you feeling
now to discover that, you know,
your ancestry's much more
complex than you thought?
You are descended from a
recent African ancestor and
recent West Indian ancestors.
ODOM: Yeah, the, the, the time
is a trip, to think that,
to think that it's that recent,
you know, and that they were
coming here willingly.
GATES: Just over
a century ago.
ODOM: Yeah, that's, uh,
I just would not have
guessed that at all.
GATES: Samuel Taylor, or
"SW" as he called himself,
was an immigrant, and a very
successful one at that.
He arrived with less
than $40 to his name,
but by 1918, he was supporting
a wife and four children
by running his own handyman
business, even advertising
in a local newspaper.
He figured out the system.
He became an entrepreneur
in less than 20 years.
ODOM: Wow!
GATES: Can you
relate to this guy?
Do you see any of this
entrepreneurial spirit
in yourself?
ODOM: Yeah, you know I'm a,
I'm a small business man
is the way I've
thought about myself
over the years, you know?
And I have my little shingle
hanging up too, and um,
you know, I have,
I have clients,
and I go from job to job,
and uh, and I also have to
have side gigs you know and
things rolling that way.
So yeah, but, but I
would've connected
that kind of spirit, I would've
connected that to my grandpa
Ben, or even to my dad
who was in sales, you know,
before I would've
even connected it
to the immigrant
spirit of S.W. Taylor.
GATES: Unfortunately, this
story was about to darken.
We were able to trace Samuel
back two generations in his
native Barbados, to Leslie's
fourth great grandmother:
a woman named Clementina Inniss.
But when we searched for
evidence of Clementina's life,
we found something painful.
ODOM: "Baptisms.
Date February 9, 1834.
Name: Clementina.
Owner: Owner?
Mr. Bowman Outtrum."
There we go.
GATES: You are looking at
the baptismal record for your
fourth great-grandmother.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: And as you can see,
Clementina was
born into slavery.
She was owned for the
first eight years of her life.
What's it like to see that?
ODOM: Mm.
We were doing so well.
Well, you know.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: But, uh, yeah, to,
it's a, it feels like,
like a hard stop.
GATES: Roughly 600,000 enslaved
Africans were shipped to
Barbados, most worked
on sugar plantations,
under hellish conditions,
but Leslie's
ancestor Clementina was
likely spared this fate.
In 1857, her former owner,
Bowman Outtrum, passed away.
And his will added a new
layer of complexity to
Leslie's family tree.
ODOM: "My remaining funds
shall be divided between
my son, Robert Thomas Outtrum,
and my daughter,
Elizabeth Ann Pile, a widow,
my illegitimate colored son,
John Robert Outtrum,
my illegitimate colored
daughter, Clementina Inniss."
Wow.
She was his daughter.
Clementina was his daughter.
GATES: And he acknowledged it.
(sighing).
ODOM: Yeah.
Sweet little Clementina.
GATES: But you know
what this also means?
Bowman Outtrum is
your fifth great-grandfather.
You descend from
that white man.
ODOM: You know,
we don't, none of us,
none of us choose
how we begin.
GATES: Mm-mm.
ODOM: Clementina didn't
get to choose how she began.
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: None of us gets to
decide how, how we get here.
It's a lot to think about.
It's a lot.
GATES: We had one more detail
to share with Leslie:
a record from Barbados that
brought a note of closure
to this chapter of
his family's story.
ODOM: "Burials solemnized
in the Westbury Cemetery in
the parish of St. Michael
in the year 1904.
October 29th,
Clementina Inniss, 78 years."
She lived a long time.
GATES: And think about this,
less than one year
before her burial,
Clementina's grandson, your
great-great-grandfather,
Samuel, would jump on
his ship, leave Barbados,
and sail past the
Statue of Liberty,
and enter the
United States of America
in search of a better
life for him, and for his
little whippersnapper
descendant who played
Aaron Burr in "Hamilton".
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: It's Samuel,
was just two generations
removed from slavery.
ODOM: That's amazing.
GATES: What's it's been like
for you to sit here across
from me and learn all of
these surprising stories
about your ancestors?
ODOM: It opens up that,
that door in your imagination.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: Um, literally and
figuratively, you know,
because you just, you,
there's lots to imagine.
And then, it opens up a door,
uh, for real places and real,
real sights, real
people to meet, um
it is a real
re-imagining of self.
GATES: We'd already traced
Nathan Lane's paternal roots
in Ireland, introducing him
to generations of ancestors
who lived in poverty,
helping to illuminate
his father's troubled life.
Now, turning to Nathan's
mother's family, we found
ourselves in happier
circumstances, focusing on
his maternal
grandmother, Mary Donnellan.
Mary helped raise Nathan,
and he and his brothers
adored her for her
intelligence and her warmth.
Your brother Dan described
her as the smartest woman
he's ever met.
Is that how you remember her?
LANE: Well, um, yeah.
I mean, yes, she was smart,
and, you know, she was um,
she was an extraordinary person.
She kind of took care of
everyone, I mean she was that
person she was there
for everybody, and uh...
GATES: Uh-hmm.
LANE: You know, this picture
of the two of us, it brings
back so many memories,
yeah, I loved her,
I loved her very much.
We were, we were
close, very close.
GATES: Like all of
Nathan's grandparents,
Mary was from Ireland.
But when we began to research
her childhood, we encountered
something unexpected.
She'd received an education
into her late teens,
likely because her
father owned a small farm,
a level of prosperity that
had eluded Nathan's
paternal ancestors.
LANE: Wow.
That's unusual, right?
GATES: That's right.
Your father's family,
as we saw, were landless,
but your mother's family
was a different story.
LANE: Yes.
GATES: Did anyone
ever talk about this?
LANE: No. No.
GATES: It's amazing.
LANE: No.
GATES: Quite remarkable.
LANE: Yeah.
GATES: They owned land and
sent their daughter to school.
LANE: Yeah.
That's really something.
GATES: When Mary was growing
up, most young people in
Ireland finished their
education as children,
and the idea that girls
should be educated at all
was a modern one!
So, Mary was an outlier, and,
as we dug into her roots,
we saw that her family's
modest ascent was quite recent.
Moving back two generations,
we found her grandfather,
James Connor, in a land
survey from 1855,
living with his wife and
children in a two-room farmhouse
in a manner that sounds
decidedly pre-modern.
As you can see, in addition
to farming, James was grazing
some animals, likely sheep or
goats, which means his family
would have had
milk and cheese.
It also means that the family
would probably have brought
their animals into the house
at night to protect against
theft and for
warmth in the winter.
Can you imagine,
a two-room house with sheep?
LANE: Ah, the plot thickens.
I see.
The sheep and the who?
And the goats?
GATES: The sheep
and the goats.
LANE: And they would
cuddle to stay warm.
Wow. That's something.
Wow. I didn't know that.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: That they would do that,
take them into their house,
the animals, to
avoid theft or...
GATES: Yeah.
And to keep them
from freezing.
LANE: And to keep
them from freezing.
GATES: Yeah.
That's right.
I'm going to show
you something else.
Look at the next page.
This is a record from 1868.
Would you please read
the transcribed section?
LANE: "Deaths Registered in
the District of Ballinasloe in
the County of Galway.
Date and Place of Death:
13th November, 1868,
Ballinasloe Work house.
Oh.
Name and surname:
James Connor.
Sex: Male.
Age at Last Birthday:
79 years.
GATES: Nathan, your
great-great-grandfather
died in a workhouse.
LANE: Oh my lord!
GATES: You ever
hear of workhouses?
LANE: Yeah.
Doesn't Scrooge mention,
"are there no workhouses?"
GATES: You got it.
LANE: How awful and
how did that happen?
GATES: To contemporary eyes,
England's "workhouse system"
seems obscene.
The "houses" were essentially
factories equipped
with dormitories.
Once inside, you had
to wear a uniform,
submit to a rigid schedule,
and, if you were
an able-bodied adult,
perform demanding labor.
In return, you were fed
and given a place to sleep.
And in Ireland, especially
in the years surrounding the
great famine,
that was precious.
We don't know why Nathan's
ancestor found himself in one
of these houses, only
that he never left.
LANE: You know, from the
outside, you're looking at
this picture, it
doesn't look so bad.
GATES: No.
LANE: It looks like a
prep school in New England.
GATES: Yeah. Right.
LANE: But behind
those walls...
GATES: Your grandmother never
shared any stories about
what happened to
her grandfather, did she?
LANE: No.
GATES: Well, we can't be sure
of the circumstances that led
him to live in the workhouse,
but he had to end up there
either because the family was
too destitute to support him,
or they had cut off contact
with him for some reason.
LANE: Yeah.
GATES: What's it like to learn
that your ancestor had to
perform menial labor in what
was essentially a voluntary
prison just to get
enough food and shelter?
LANE: Well, the notion that
he lost his farm and lost what
was obviously, for him, a
decent life with his family
and then was subjected to this,
is just a great tragedy
as obviously as many people
were experiencing this as well.
So, it's just a
horrific history.
Wow.
GATES: Do you think that
the trauma our ancestors
suffer gets passed
down to us somehow?
LANE: That's an
interesting question.
Um, I'm sure in
some way it does.
It is a part of you in some
way you're not even aware of.
GATES: Yeah.
LANE: You know, maybe that's
where I got my, my...
strength to survive, uh
whether it's the emotional
trauma of a difficult childhood
with you know, parents who
were not doing so well,
or just the trials and
tribulations of show business.
GATES: Sure.
LANE: And the constant ups
and downs, and rejections and
humiliations and so,
maybe that's where
I got my strength.
GATES: We'd already
taken Leslie Odom's
maternal ancestry back to
18th century Barbados.
Now, turning to his father's
roots, we found ourselves on
more familiar terrain: in
the American south, trying to
recover stories buried
in the abyss of slavery.
We soon focused on Leslie's
third great-grandfather,
a man named Alex Dowling.
Alex was likely born around 1850
in Barnwell County,
South Carolina,
seeking to learn more we
found a slave schedule
from that same
year for a white planter
in Barnwell named
"Decania Dowling."
Enslaved people are not listed
by name on this schedule,
but two of these hash marks
represent children who would
have been roughly
the same age as Alex.
ODOM: "One black male, six
months old; one mulatto male,
six months old."
GATES: What's it
like to see that?
ODOM: Well, a very different
experience from what you, uh,
illuminated for me
on my mom's side.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know, I was
expecting something like this.
I was expecting a
little more of this.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: It's still, uh, cloudy.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: You know, and hazy
is better than nothing.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: I'll tell you that.
But, uh, yeah.
This is, this is sort of
more what I was expecting.
Yeah.
GATES: For many of my guests,
this would mark the end of our
search: with only anonymous
hash marks to guide us,
we can rarely go further.
But in Leslie's case,
we got lucky.
Our researchers noticed that
the planter who filed this
schedule had a son named
"Elijah Dowling", and that
same name appears on the death
certificate of Leslie's
third great-grandfather Alex, as
being the name of his father!
This raised a question:
could Elijah Dowling, the
son of a white slaveowner,
in fact be Leslie's fourth
great-grandfather?
There was only one
way to tell for sure.
We compared Leslie's DNA to
that of millions of other
people in publicly-available
databases,
looking for matches,
and trying to see how those
matches might be related,
a technique that eventually
allowed us to establish
the identity of Alex Dowling's
father beyond all doubt.
You with me?
ODOM: I'm with you.
GATES: Would you
please turn the page.
Would you please read the name
of the man in the red box in
the middle of the chart?
ODOM: "Elijah Henry Dowling."
GATES: Elijah Dowling was,
in fact, Alex's biological
father, which makes him your
fourth great-grandfather,
just as we suspected.
ODOM: Wow.
GATES: But the only
way to prove that...
ODOM: Was DNA?
GATES: Was through DNA.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Maybe you weren't as
far away from Aaron Burr
as you thought!
Would you please
turn the page?
ODOM: Who is that?
GATES: That is your
fourth great-grandfather.
That is Elijah Henry Dowling.
ODOM: Oh, really?
Okay.
GATES: That is your grand-pappy.
What do you see
when you look at your
fourth great-grandfather?
ODOM: Uh, what do I see?
Well, I wouldn't, uh, I
wouldn't know to regard him
as family if I, you know,
if I met him and...
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: I, I have no ideas
about the views that he held.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
ODOM: But just by nature
of the time that he lived
I suspect, that his
views are suspect.
Um, so I don't know.
I don't, you know.
I don't know what
to make of him.
GATES: We had a little more
information to help Leslie
sort out his feelings
about his ancestor.
Records show that
Elijah was a doctor,
a successful farmer, and,
when the Civil War came,
a very eager confederate.
He served as assistant surgeon
of the 1st South Carolina
volunteer regiment
beginning in the
early months of the war!
ODOM: Old South's defender.
GATES: Yep.
ODOM: Okay.
GATES: How does it make
you feel to learn this?
ODOM: I'm an American, you
know, I'm an American,
and so we, i-in the
same way that our,
that our country,
um, is, uh, messy...
GATES: Mmm-hmm
ODOM: And mess, and messed up,
and that, you know,
and that, that,
that, the history,
the book of, the
book of America...
GATES: Yes, that's right.
ODOM: You know, it looks a
lot like this, you know?
GATES: That's, it's true.
ODOM: I'm a, I'm a product of,
of this country, of, um...
GATES: Yeah.
ODOM: Proud immigrants.
GATES: Proud immigrants.
ODOM: And, and also of, uh,
this, this part of
our history too, so...
GATES: You got all of it, man.
ODOM: I got all of it.
GATES: On your, on
your family tree.
ODOM: Yeah.
GATES: Now that we'd identified
Alex's father, we wondered
about the circumstances of
his birth, we knew that his
mother, Leslie's fourth
great-grandmother, was a woman
named Rachel, and we suspected
that Rachel, too, was enslaved
by the Dowling family.
We found our proof in the estate
records of Decania Dowling,
Alex's grandfather
had set down his human
property by name
and dollar value.
Giving Leslie a sobering
glimpse of his ancestors.
ODOM: "A list of articles
appraised, belonging to the
estate of D. Dowling,
October 28th, 1857.
Acc, $700.
Rachel and child, $950."
GATES: What's it like to
have this information?
ODOM: Knowing whatever, you
know, the appraisers assigned
to them, whatever couple
hundred measly dollars the
appraisers assigned to
them is irrelevant to me.
But to honor their presence
and to honor their, the fact
that they lived and that
they weren't, things,
that they weren't objects,
is, is deeply meaningful, and,
and rights a
wrong, you know.
So, it's not...
there's not a ton that you can,
that you can give back to them,
but you can give them
back the dignity of...
you know, their humanity,
and just the...
Yeah, you can make
them not things.
GATES: There was a grace note
to this story: as we traced
Leslie's ancestors forward
in time, we found his
third great-grandfather
Alex in the 1880 census,
living with his wife
and four children in
Bamberg, South Carolina,
not far from where he was
enslaved, and yet, truly,
a world away.
Alex now owned a farm,
and 115 acres of land!
In 1870, only about 4% of
rural Black family heads in
South Carolina
owned any land at all.
ODOM: My goodness.
My goodness. Wow.
GATES: But what's it like to
see this and know that your
ancestor Alex was able to
prosper, despite the fact that
his life had begun in slavery?
ODOM: That's powerful.
GATES: Mmm-hmm.
ODOM: That's really powerful.
GATES: What do you think
you've inherited from all
these people to whom
you've been introduced today.
ODOM: It is so
disparate and so varied.
Um, it's hard for me in
this moment to find the
connections, but it's a little
bit of a miracle, you know?
The, it's, it's, uh, the story
of survival, and ingenuity,
and, uh, creativity,
and I'm sure pain.
GATES: Oh, big time.
ODOM: And, uh,
luck, and favor.
And all of that.
So, I'm just happy to be able
to have some specificity about
the way I think about myself,
and where I've come from.
GATES: The paper trail had
run out for each of my guests.
ODOM: Oh, wow.
GATES: It was time to unfurl
their family trees...
ODOM: Wow.
LANE: Oh, my God.
GATES: Now filled with names
they'd never heard before.
LANE: It's just extraordinary.
GATES: Seeing their ancestors
laid out before them,
stretching back centuries,
allowed each to reflect on the
women and men who had
done so much to lay
the groundwork
for their success.
ODOM: To be able to name
roots, to be able to trace
roots is, uh, you know
and remove question marks.
It's, uh, centering.
It's grounding,
pardon the pun, you know?
GATES: No, it's...
ODOM: It's grounding.
GATES: That's a
good word for it.
ODOM: You know, what a,
what a miracle we all are.
You know, that, um, these
small and big decisions that
people made before we got
here, made us possible.
LANE: It is a little
overwhelming to look at all of
those people and know that
you're a part of them now
in a way that I never realized.
GATES: You're a part of them
and they're a part of you.
LANE: Yeah.
And I, I, you know, I
certainly feel that now.
GATES: Does it change
the way you think about
being an American?
LANE: Yes. It does.
It you know, this whole, this
whole book, this whole series
it's like, this is what
this country is based on.
People coming from elsewhere.
GATES: Right.
LANE: Coming here to follow
a dream to you know,
to escape something,
to find something.
You know, it's so much a part
of this country's history.
GATES: Right.
LANE: And it's the
basis of who we are.
GATES: That's the
end of our journey with
Nathan Lane and
Leslie Odom, Jr.
Join me next time when we
unlock the secrets of the past
for new guests on
another episode of
"Finding Your Roots".