Finding Your Roots — Season 1, Episode 3: Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada

Episode synopsis

What's in a name? Well, a lot, at least when it comes to piecing together your family history. For former slaves, choosing a last name was one of their first acts of freedom. For Jewish immigrants, it was a way to fit in their new country. Whatever the reason for a name change, it can make the process of learning about one's ancestors difficult, if not impossible. In this episode, we unearth missing links in the family histories of media legend Barbara Walters and educational superstar Geoffrey Canada. Walters did not know her father's real last name. Canada did not know the name of his grandfather. Both of them had been unable to access their history... until now.

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

• E1Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.
• E2John Lewis and Cory Booker
• 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