- 6/25/2025
"Finding Your Roots" reveals surprising and sometimes troubling ancestral histories! Join us as we look at ten celebrities who unearthed problematic pasts on the show. From Laura Linney's convicted ancestor to Angela Davis's Mayflower connection, and Ben Affleck's slave-owning relative, these discoveries challenge our perceptions of family and history. We'll also explore the stories of Michael Imperioli, Soledad O'Brien, Michael Douglas, Kristen Bell, Brendan Fraser, Jeff Daniels, and Anderson Cooper, and how they reacted to these shocking revelations about their roots.
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00:00Wrong side of history, friend.
00:04Welcome to Ms. Mojo.
00:05And today, we'll be looking at the most controversial discoveries celebrities made about their ancestors on Finding Your Roots.
00:12Is this a mode of behavior? Has it been passed out?
00:19Laura Linney.
00:20For most participants on this genealogy show, their ancestors voluntarily migrated to the United States in search of better economic opportunities.
00:30But Laura Linney's ancestor was brought against his own will.
00:33Records show that William was in fact born in England, and that he didn't exactly leave his homeland under the best of circumstances.
00:42In this Season 5 episode, the Finding Your Roots researchers managed to uncover a court document showing that Linney's fifth great-grandfather, William Linney, had been indicted in England for knowingly receiving stolen goods.
00:56Thomas Dollymoor was indicted for stealing, and William Linney for receiving 54 iron hoops for pails.
01:05In January 1768, following his conviction, he and several other felons were transported from London to Virginia aboard the Neptune.
01:15While it's not the most uplifting information to discover about one's ancestor, Linney seemed to find some comfort in knowing that William accepted responsibility for his actions.
01:24Linney said, no, I own, I had the goods.
01:29I own, I had the goods.
01:30So we fessed up.
01:32Michael Imperioli.
01:34Between 1920 and 1933, the U.S. outlawed the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol, a period known as Prohibition.
01:44Despite the ban, many bar owners continued selling liquor illegally, including actor Michael Imperioli's great-grandfather, Rafael Rea.
01:52Thinking about it now, it's like, it's such an obvious thing.
01:56Like, if you owned a bar and then Prohibition comes, it's like, either you're going to close it and do something completely different, or you're going to, you know, do it illegally.
02:05Right.
02:05After Prohibition took effect, Rea and his family began storing large amounts of alcohol in their cellar, and selling it illicitly to customers.
02:13In 1923, however, this operation ended in an unfortunate accident when a fire broke out, trapping Rea and an infant in the hallway.
02:23According to this article, he and his family were storing liquor in their cellar.
02:28But Rea wasn't the only family member who defied the law during this era.
02:32In 1922, his sister-in-law was arrested and charged after unknowingly serving whiskey to a federal agent.
02:40Now, what I'm really curious about is how much, like, my mother knows about this stuff.
02:44Like, did she know any of this? I'm really curious.
02:47Right.
02:47Because I never heard these stories.
02:48Angela Davis.
02:50By the blessing of God, the first beginners, and, in a sort, the foundation of all the plantations and colonies in New England.
03:00When she appeared on Finding Your Roots in 2023, seeking answers about her maternal ancestry, political activist Angela Davis got a little more than she bargained for.
03:10A lifelong civil rights advocate dedicated to dismantling structural racism, Davis was surprised to learn that she descended from someone whose legacy stood in stark contrast to her own.
03:21That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower.
03:25No, I can't believe this.
03:26No.
03:27No, my ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower.
03:32Your ancestors came on the Mayflower.
03:34No, no, no, no.
03:35The show's researchers traced her lineage to William Brewster, her 10th great-grandfather on her father's side, one of the 101 white settlers who arrived in the American colonies aboard the Mayflower.
03:47This revelation was a little too much for Davis to handle, as she was left grappling with the contradiction between her life's work and the history of her ancestors.
03:56Did you ever, did you ever, in your wildest dreams, think that you may have descended from people who laid the foundation for this kind of thing?
04:05Never, never, never, never, never.
04:08Soledad O'Brien.
04:10What would lead a 41-year-old woman to end up in a jail cell with a group of unruly teenage boys?
04:15For veteran broadcast journalist Soledad O'Brien, the answer lay in a prison register from 19th-century Scotland.
04:24I didn't realize on the Whiteman side, which, by the way, nobody talks about.
04:27And now I know why.
04:29Because they also ran things, like scams.
04:32Host Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented O'Brien with the document showing that her third-great-grandmother, Lilius Whiteman, was arrested for robbery in Edinburgh.
04:42However, Whiteman wasn't the one committing the crimes herself.
04:46Instead, she appeared to be orchestrating a gang of teenage boys who carried out petty thefts and delivered the stolen goods to her.
04:53Or she was leading a ring of 12-year-old and 14-year-old boys who were knocking over shops.
05:01In Edinburgh, Scotland.
05:03The revelation was initially embarrassing for O'Brien.
05:06But as she uncovered more about Whiteman's circumstances and the hardships she faced, she developed empathy for her.
05:13So her husband died at age 39.
05:16Yeah, the death of her husband, the breadwinner, was probably what pushed Lilius and William into the life of petty larceny.
05:24That's really sad.
05:25Michael Douglas
05:26Before he appeared on Finding Your Roots in 2024, actor Michael Douglas believed his grandfather had moved to America to avoid conscription into the Russian army.
05:37It was the story his father had told him, but he would soon discover that it was all a lie.
05:42I guess this is probably the part that they were not proud about when they first came to this country.
05:49Yeah, we left that behind.
05:50His grandfather, who went by the name Harry Dembski, was actually born Gersh Danilovich and had been arrested in Russia for robbery as part of a gang.
06:00Charged under Articles 13 and 1642.
06:06Well, you got some real little gang here.
06:08Gersh wasn't the only family member with a criminal background.
06:12His brother, Mavsha, was allegedly even more dangerous, as he was wanted for armed robbery, though never arrested.
06:19To avoid prosecution for their crimes, it appears Gersh and Mavsha fled Russia and started new lives in the U.S. under different identities.
06:28That his father came to America to escape the army.
06:31Right.
06:31He came to America to escape prison.
06:34Prison.
06:35Yeah.
06:35It's blowing my mind.
06:38Kristen Bell.
06:39Espionage is typically something we associate with movies and TV shows, not with our own family history.
06:46Yet for actor Kristen Bell, it turned out to be very real.
06:49I was like, what is my history?
06:53What, collectively or individually, I want to learn more.
06:56She discovered that her seventh great-grandfather, William Bell, emigrated from Scotland just three years before the American Revolutionary War began.
07:06When the war broke out, William revealed his true loyalties by joining the fight, not as a patriot, but as a loyalist.
07:13To the best of our knowledge and belief, know him to have been and is a loyal subject to the crown government of Great Britain.
07:20Even more shocking, an affidavit written four years after the war revealed that he had secretly served as a British spy, tracking the movements of the Patriot troops and relaying them to his superiors.
07:33That he has suffered greatly both in person and estate on account of his loyalty to his majesty.
07:39He was a spy.
07:42He was a loyalist and a spy.
07:44Once his covert activities were uncovered, he was arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately exiled along with his family.
07:52Brendan Fraser
07:53A work dispute took a shockingly violent turn for actor Brendan Fraser's great-great-grandfather, Patrick Devine.
08:00We're gonna get a gun. We're gonna ambush him.
08:04Yeah.
08:04They had a plan. They, that's, that's criminal.
08:07Back in the 19th century, Devine was a coal miner who had moved to the U.S. from Ireland and worked at a factory in Pennsylvania.
08:15Wages for coal miners were already low, but after their pay was cut even further, Devine and his colleagues went on strike, only to be fired and replaced by other workers.
08:26Rather than appeal to management, Devine reportedly shot his replacement, although the man survived.
08:32James McBrarity and Patrick Devine had struck against a reduction of wages, and the man fired at had taken one of their places.
08:46Remarkably, Devine faced no legal repercussions for the shooting.
08:50In fact, he was even rehired at the same coal mine and continued working there long enough to buy his own home.
08:56Through his employment in the mines, your great-great-grandfather, an immigrant, was able to reach one of the cornerstones of the American dream.
09:03He purchased his own home.
09:06Jeff Daniels
09:07During the Salem Witch Trials, mass hysteria swept through the community, leading many to accuse their friends and neighbors of witchcraft.
09:15One of such people was Captain Thomas Chandler, the eighth great-grandfather of actor Jeff Daniels.
09:22Now the Salem Witch Trials are my fault.
09:23All right. Sure. Bring it. Bring it. I can handle it. I can persevere through that.
09:31Daniels discovered his ancestor's role in the trials when he appeared on the ninth season of Finding Your Roots.
09:37He was presented with documents that showed Chandler testified against a man named Samuel Wardwell, a self-professed fortune teller.
09:45Now, according to scholars with whom we spoke, your ancestor's testimony in this trial is fairly mild, but this was not his only involvement.
09:54While that testimony carried little weight, it certainly proved far more significant in the case of Mary Parker, Chandler's neighbor, whom he believed had used sorcery on his daughter and granddaughter.
10:05So Mary Parker is practicing witchcraft and sorcery on his daughter and granddaughter.
10:13That's right. Against two generations of his family.
10:16And we're going to put a stop to that.
10:17That's right.
10:18His statements played a part in securing the convictions and subsequent executions of both Wardwell and Parker.
10:25Anderson Cooper.
10:27Renowned journalist Anderson Cooper isn't the first celebrity to find out they had ancestors who owned slaves, but the fate of his slave-owning ancestor was pretty unique.
10:37Burwell Boykin, cause of death, killed by Negro.
10:41Cooper's paternal fourth-great-grandfather was a man named Burwell Boykin, who oversaw a plantation in the southern United States where 12 enslaved people labored under harsh conditions.
10:53After one of the slaves managed to escape, he was eventually recaptured and locked in a shed.
10:59This escapee then rebelled by attacking Boykin with a farm hoe and killing him.
11:04So you can see the slaves did rebel, but they rebelled in small ways.
11:08Small ways.
11:08Devastating personal consequences.
11:10Yeah.
11:11I wish I knew more.
11:12I wish I knew the name of the slave.
11:14For his murderous act of defiance, the slave was reportedly executed without so much as a trial.
11:20Despite being stunned by this revelation,
11:23Cooper admitted he felt little sympathy for Boykin.
11:26It's a horrible way to die, Anderson.
11:28He had 12 slaves.
11:29I don't feel bad for him.
11:30Okay.
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11:47Ben Affleck.
11:48While Anderson Cooper openly acknowledged his family's history with slavery, actor Ben Affleck didn't seem ready to do the same.
11:56In the second season of the show, Affleck learned that his maternal ancestor, Benjamin L. Cole, was a slave owner in Georgia.
12:03And it's fascinating to me that these family stories have been lost.
12:08Yeah, I'm sure that there's so much of people's history that gets lost over time.
12:13Seemingly embarrassed by this revelation, Affleck pressured the show's producers to omit it from the final cut in favor of less controversial details.
12:21But just like his ancestors' problematic past, Affleck's attempt to hide the truth was eventually exposed.
12:28We tend to separate ourselves from these things by going like, you know, oh, well, it's just dry history and it's all over now.
12:34And this shows us that there's still a living aspect to the history, like a personal connection.
12:38During the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, a leaked email revealed his request to suppress the information.
12:44Although production on Finding Your Roots was temporarily suspended afterwards, the show eventually resumed after Affleck publicly apologized.
13:04Have you ever gone digging into your ancestry?
13:07What troubling discoveries did you happen upon?
13:10Let us know in the comments.
13:14That it was something that he actually believed in, but that doesn't make it a bit better.
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