- 7 weeks ago
Some family stories are passed down for generations — but the truth can be a total game-changer. Join us as we count down the most shocking moments when "Finding Your Roots" used DNA and historical records to debunk long-held family rumors! From surprising ancestry reveals to paternity mysteries finally solved, these discoveries left both guests and viewers absolutely speechless.
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00:00But it's completely different than what I thought, what I believed happened.
00:09Welcome to Ms. Mojo.
00:11And today, we're counting down our picks for the most notable times when Finding Your Roots rewrote everything guests thought
00:18they knew about their families.
00:20Holy moly.
00:21Just your Swedish ancestors.
00:23I am so Swedish.
00:25Number 10, Joyce Willis.
00:27I never thought I would ever get to see these names.
00:31I was just so stuck.
00:33I never thought I would ever see these names.
00:35Well, that's why the Lord sent you here.
00:37Ex-diff.
00:38One of three everyday Americans brought on Finding Your Roots, Joyce Willis arrived with a question that had haunted her
00:44grandmother, Beatrice.
00:46As a child, Beatrice's father, Robert Willis, teased her that he might not be her real father.
00:52Decades later, Joyce sought to know if it was true.
00:55When Beatrice was nearing the end of her life, she told Joyce that she might not actually be a Willis.
01:05Gates first reconstructed Robert's family, tracing him to Howard Willis and Frances Fanny Stewart.
01:11Then, Beatrice's DNA provided the breakthrough.
01:15Her matches connected her to Fanny's parents, which confirmed that Robert was indeed her biological father.
01:21Joyce finally knew she was a Willis.
01:24That means Robert is your biological great-grandfather.
01:28Ah, see, you was teasing her for nothing.
01:32Oh, I feel she's so justified and vindicated now.
01:36But the DNA had another surprise.
01:38Beatrice and her sister Melba were actually half-siblings.
01:42Robert was Beatrice's father, but not Melba's.
01:46Suddenly, that old family joke looked a lot less random.
01:49Or maybe he sussed out that infidelity that led to Melba and then wondered how long the relationship had gone
01:58on.
01:58It could be.
01:58It could be.
01:59You know, was this something long-standing that I'm just now finding out about?
02:03Number 9.
02:03Chrissy Teigen
02:04Model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen had recently come to believe that her paternal grandmother,
02:11Ruth Schaefer, was Jewish.
02:12And she was proud of the connection.
02:15I understand in the last couple of years, you have come to believe that your grandmother, Ruth, was Jewish.
02:20Yes.
02:21Well, that was quite a story, and we wanted to investigate it for you.
02:25Yeah.
02:25Gates and his team investigated, but found no records indicating Jewish ancestry.
02:30So they turned to DNA, using Teigen's father because he was one generation closer to Ruth.
02:37If Ruth were fully Jewish, Gates explained,
02:40her son would be expected to have roughly 50% Jewish ancestry.
02:44The results, however, showed he had zero.
02:47You have no idea how proud I was to be Jewish.
02:51That is so...
02:54Wow.
02:55Where do you think that idea came from?
02:59I have no idea.
03:00Teigen was stunned, admitting she had been proud to be Jewish.
03:04The investigation then uncovered that Ruth had actually descended from German ancestors,
03:10including several generations of musicians.
03:13And Teigen has Sinti ancestry, a subgroup of the Romani people.
03:19They're traditionally itinerant people who lived all over Europe for centuries,
03:23and you are part Roma.
03:26Wow.
03:27That's so cool.
03:31In the 50s and 60s, being illegitimate was a big deal.
03:36Not on the positive side.
03:38Nope.
03:40And I was teased about that.
03:42On his birth certificate, the man listed as Cherokee actor Wes Studi's father was Eugene Philpott.
03:49So Studi had spent his years believing that Philpott was his father.
03:53He even confronted him as a young man, but Philpott denied it.
03:57Sat down with him, and he just immediately said,
04:01I know what you're going to ask me, but no, I'm not.
04:05Huh.
04:07And we left it at that.
04:09Years later, Finding Your Roots put the question to DNA.
04:12The results showed no significant genetic connection between Studi and Philpott.
04:17Instead, Studi's DNA linked him to descendants of Jesse and Katie Blair,
04:22identifying them as his paternal grandparents.
04:25Their sons, Jess and Bobby, were both plausible candidates for his biological father,
04:30but the available DNA could not distinguish between them.
04:33In a way, I'm dumbfounded by the, I mean, I asked the question, got the answer,
04:39and now I'm dumbfounded.
04:42Without words, really.
04:43So Gates could definitively overturn one family belief while leaving Studi with two possible answers.
04:50More secrets, more surprises.
04:52Scan the QR code on your screen and join the Ms. Mojo 24-7 live stream for even more pop
04:58culture countdowns.
05:00We can learn everything from history, and we don't want to repeat it.
05:06Yeah, and we do, over and over again.
05:07Over and over again.
05:08Number 7. Scarlett Johansson
05:10Scarlett Johansson grew up connected to her father's Danish heritage.
05:15Her father was born in Copenhagen, and the family understood the Johansson line to be Danish.
05:20I feel very connected to that side because my dad is so Danish, and I wanted to have a part
05:26of that, I guess.
05:27I thought it would be cool to be represented that way because I'm not just American, but I'm Danish too.
05:35However, Gates' researchers hit a wall in Danish records, then found something unexpected in Swedish church archives.
05:43Scarlett's great-grandfather, Axel Robert Johansson, was actually born in Sweden.
05:48This meant that her paternal line was Swedish, not Danish.
05:52Scarlett was floored, joking that she might need to visit Stockholm.
05:55I mean, every single one of these people are all born in Sweden.
05:59So much for that Danish passport, kiddo.
06:01I know, wait a minute.
06:03I'm going to Stockholm.
06:06Yeah, wow, that is crazy.
06:08I had no idea.
06:09Then another family impression got an intriguing correction.
06:12She had always sensed something aristocratic about her grandfather,
06:15but researchers initially found no noble ancestors.
06:18But with this new Swedish connection, researchers uncovered her ancestor, Johan Hogg's coat of arms.
06:26His family had, in fact, been ennobled in Sweden in 1689.
06:31See, I was from some sort of noble age.
06:33I almost fell off this piano stool when you said that.
06:36You were right all along.
06:37Wow.
06:38You come from an aristocracy.
06:39Could not be further from the other part of my family.
06:42Number six, Megan Robertson.
06:44Another non-celebrity brought on the show, Megan Robertson had spent years trying to solve
06:50what she believed was an adoption mystery.
06:52Her great-grandfather, Green Church, was said to have been put up for adoption as a child,
06:58leaving the family unsure about his origins.
07:00And that they didn't have any information.
07:02That he had passed away and we didn't know who had raised him or where he came from.
07:07What was your reaction?
07:10I remember being sad.
07:12Then, Gates found Green in the 1900 North Carolina census.
07:16He was five years old and living on a farm with his grandparents alongside his brother Rufus.
07:22So the adoption story did not fit the record.
07:25I knew that he probably had a brother named, like, a half-brother.
07:29But I didn't know that they ever knew each other or lived together or anything like this.
07:34Records then pointed to Caroline Moxley, who was their mother.
07:37Going by a census taken 10 years later, it appeared that Caroline had married another man
07:42and moved to Virginia with her other children, leaving Green and Rufus behind with her parents.
07:48He found no evidence that Caroline and Green ever reconnected, or that she ever reconnected with Rufus.
07:54It seems she just left the boys behind forever.
07:57Yeah.
07:57Number 5.
07:58Henry Louis Gates Jr.
08:00Even host Henry Louis Gates Jr. had a family lore that got turned on its head on his own show.
08:06His family had long believed that Samuel Dunlap Brady, a white farmer who owned Gates' great-great-grandmother Jane,
08:13was the biological father of her children.
08:15This is the oldest Gates on record.
08:17This is exactly what he said.
08:19I never want you to forget our name, and I never want you to forget our face.
08:26However, DNA research carried out by CeCe Moore proved that to be false.
08:31Edward, Jane's son and Gates' great-grandfather, was apparently fathered by Charles Wesley Kelly,
08:38a white farmer who died after being struck by lightning.
08:41Even as we're talking, I'm embracing Charles W. Kelly.
08:44I'm so glad.
08:45And I'm sorry he was killed by lightning.
08:48But it's not what I expected.
08:51Gates called his family, quote, so close to the truth.
08:55They had correctly connected Jane's story to a white man, but named the wrong one.
08:59It was a striking reminder that family lore can sometimes preserve the outline while losing the specific identity.
09:06Jane, according to my father, and the source of this must have been his grandfather,
09:13told the five children that they all had the same father and that he was white.
09:18That was it.
09:18But it's the kind of thing that you would say to protect your reputation.
09:25Number 4.
09:25Roseanne Cash
09:26The racist rumors that swirled around Vivian Cash during Johnny Cash's rise to fame were ugly and deliberate.
09:33As a result, Johnny publicly insisted that his wife was white.
09:37There was a lot of upset with my parents.
09:40My dad got into a public battle with the KKK.
09:45Mm-hmm.
09:46And so I knew about that, and it was scary.
09:49Finding Your Roots, however, revealed a far more layered truth about Roseanne's maternal ancestry.
09:55Researchers found that Roseanne's great-great-grandfather, Lafayette Robinson,
09:59was classified as, quote, mulatto in the 1870 census.
10:03So he was half black, half white?
10:05He was mixed race.
10:08So it was at least a small part true.
10:12They then traced his mother, Sarah Shields, who was born enslaved and later freed through
10:17the actions of her white father, planter William B. Shields.
10:21Later records repeatedly identify Sarah's descendants as white, suggesting that the family concealed
10:26or abandoned its African ancestry throughout the Jim Crow era.
10:31Heartbreaking.
10:34Don't you?
10:35I just kind of wish I could go back in time and fix things.
10:39Number three, Tony Gonzalez.
10:42NFL Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez believed his grandmother, Helen, and great-grandmother,
10:47Ophelia, were white, with some family members even speculating Ophelia was Polish or Italian.
10:52All growing up, not just me either, this affects my brother and then my cousins.
10:58Yeah.
10:59And there's a whole bunch of them.
11:00We always thought that my grandmother, Helen, was white.
11:04Right.
11:05And Ophelia, great-grandmother, my great-grandma, was white.
11:09DNA identified Ophelia's biological father as John Rhys Hudson, a white man.
11:14That much, the family had right.
11:16But Ophelia herself was biracial.
11:18Her mother, Dora, was a black woman working on a Georgia farm, while Hudson was a prominent white man.
11:24I wonder if she could even talk about it.
11:26Yeah.
11:27It's illegal.
11:27I wonder if, yeah, if she ever told even her mother who the father was.
11:30Their relationship existed in Jim Crow-era Georgia, where interracial marriage was illegal.
11:36Gonzalez immediately understood the family's mistake.
11:38The rumor had taken one true detail, that Ophelia had a white father, and transformed it into a completely different
11:45claim about her own identity.
11:47It's going to close, you know what I mean?
11:49Like, close some chapters for, of not knowing for 104 years where you're from and who you come from.
11:57Number 2.
11:58Condoleezza Rice
11:59For generations, Rice's family carried a specific story.
12:03Their great-grandmother, Julia Head, was the daughter of a white plantation owner named Burroughs Head.
12:09Julia Head was a gigantic presence.
12:13Everybody told the story of her sitting on the back porch with a pipe.
12:17She smoked a corncob pipe, apparently.
12:20And she used to sit with her shotgun quite a lot.
12:22So she was a pretty tough, tough lady.
12:24Gates' team verified that Julia had indeed been enslaved by the Head family.
12:29The paper trail held up in that regard.
12:31But the critical question was paternity.
12:33And that's where DNA cut clean through the family narrative.
12:37Researchers located a biological descendant of Burroughs Head and compared their DNA directly with Rice's.
12:44There was no genetic match.
12:46We did not find any DNA evidence of that relationship.
12:50When the brothers say, DNA don't lie, that's what they're talking about.
12:54I have to agree with that.
12:56The conclusion was striking.
12:57Rice's family had identified the wrong white man.
13:00Importantly, the DNA did not erase Rice's broader European ancestry.
13:05It only corrected the identity of the supposed ancestor.
13:08I think that my female ancestors probably suffered a lot.
13:14And that I have to be very grateful that they survived it all.
13:26Before we continue, check out this single from Sound Mojo's Adia, Songs from Iran, reimagining Persian melodies as modern rock,
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13:38A cradle of hearts where stars align.
13:42Together we stand in your sacred light.
13:47Against all darkness we rise and fight.
13:51Number one, Barry Diller.
13:53First of all, it ruins a narrative story that I've had for so long.
13:57Right.
13:57Which is such a cracking, good, terrible story that I'm reluctant to give it up.
14:04The story Barry Diller had carried about his mother's childhood was painful in a very particular way.
14:10His grandfather, Harry Addison, died when Barry's mother was just three years old.
14:15Afterward, his grandmother, Dora, placed her children in an orphanage.
14:19The family explanation was that Dora had abandoned them to marry a wealthy man.
14:24So she goes to San Francisco and immediately puts her children in.
14:27In under three months, your mother lost her father, was moved all the way across the country, 3,000 miles,
14:34and was admitted to an orphanage under the care of total strangers.
14:39Gates pulled the orphanage records and found an entirely different picture.
14:43Dora initially kept her youngest infant with her and only placed the other children
14:48because she was unable to support them, not because of a wealthy suitor.
14:52Diller was visibly stunned.
14:54Because I had believed that she was placed at the orphanage because her mother's new husband
15:05of wealth didn't want her.
15:08Right.
15:09But that does not seem to be true.
15:11Then another piece of family lore collapsed.
15:14Diller had been told that Harry Addison had died in a streetcar accident.
15:18Newspapers reported that the Boston Elevated Conductor actually took his own life following
15:22illness and despondency.
15:24Well, I'm shocked.
15:27I don't know what I am.
15:29But that my mother never discussed this.
15:34And I presume, although we don't know, maybe she didn't know.
15:41What family rumors in your ancestry have gotten debunked?
15:44Let us know in the comments.