Last evening (08 Oct 2019) I watched to first episode of Season Six of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I found the three case studies featured in this episode to be interesting and satisfying.
The subjects were Isabella Rossellini, Angelica Huston, and Mia Farrow. Mia Farrow’s ancestry was traced to Australia, Angelica Huston’s to Italy, and Isabella Rossellini’s to Sweden.
Rossellini is the daughter of Ingred Bergman, an actress who was well-known for being born in Sweden. Gates and his research crew traced her ancestry to Norrköping, Sweden. That resonated with me because I had visited a training school for foundry workers in nearby Jönköping during a business trip to Sweden and Denmark in the 1970s while I was working as the engineering editor of Foundry magazine.
Overall, I was impressed by what the episode revealed in terms of “old world” documentation for the ancestors of the three guests.
DNA also figured into the episode when Gates revealed that Rossellini shared some DNA with another actress with Swedish roots: Scarlett Johansson.
Upcoming episodes will be broadcast in the Cleveland area on WVIZ PBS on Tuesdays at 8 pm. I’ll be tuning in to learn the ancestral stories of many fascinating guests, including Jeffrey Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Melissa McCarthy, Sterling K. Brown, Jordan Peele, Nancy Pelosi, Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell, Queen Latifah, Jon Batiste, Diane von Furstenberg, Zac Posen, Jeff Goldblum, Terry Gross, Eric Stonestreet and more.
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