Finding Your Roots — Season 1, Episode 1: Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.

Episode synopsis

Their European immigrant ancestors blazed unconventional trails in America, from capturing British ships for the American Revolution to crossing racial barriers in slave-era Louisiana. Generations later, as children growing up in New Orleans, Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis found a deep and abiding friendship through their common love of jazz and of the city itself. In this hour, we trace the turbulent and contradictory history of the city of New Orleans through the family stories of these two fascinating men.

About Finding Your Roots

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

More episodes from Season 1

• E2John Lewis and Cory Booker
• E3Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada
• E4Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
• E5Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi
• E6Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal
• E7Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons
• E8Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta
• E9John Legend and Wanda Sykes
• E10Adrian Grenier, Michelle Rodriguez and Linda Chavez